A mystery writer whose work I like very much wrote a novel that I'm sure she hoped would be optioned by movie producer. It wasn't a mystery. It was a flight of fancy. But she is a good writer, so it was a well crafted, entertaining flight of fancy. And it would make an excellent movie that I could watch when it finally got to basic cable, but only to see how the actors and director interpreted the characters and their mannerisms.

Reading is FUNdamental. Didn't use to be that way. Used to be you had to learn by doing. Silversmiths learned their trade as apprentices and played with pewter for 10 or 15 years. For most of the history of mankind, that's the way we learned. Gutenberg, the printer, not the actor, really got the ball rolling. Look where we are now! There's nothing you can't find in print!

And now we have videos and audio tapes supplementing reading. But what you do best in life comes from learning by doing, no matter how much of the theory of it you read before hand.

Martha Grimes. That's the writer's name.