Lloyds or The Gherkin – On the Pointlessness of prescription

I’m not much for trying to teach people the business of writing, still less trying to give them prescriptive/proscriptive lists on how to do it. There is so much variation in literature, everything from the brutal telegraphic fury of James Ellroy to the sensuous lyricism of James Lee Burke, and that’s just two straight white guys on adjacent shelves in the crime fiction corner, telling broadly similar kinds of tales. Same sex, same genre, same country and basic post-war period, they even ha...