Fun, laughter and crime with the writer of Eats, Shoots & Leaves Lynne Truss

Writer and broadcaster Lynne Truss is most famous for her book on grammar Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Of course, the topic came up but she is so over it. Requests for a comment on Waterstones dropping the apostrophe from its title is more likely to be greeted with a soupcon of sarcasm rather than a treatise on the placement of a comma.

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What surprised Truss the most about the reaction to that book was critics and observers were surprised that she has a sense of humour - those leaping to that conclusion had seldom read Eats, Shoots & Leaves. If they had, they would have known that Truss is sharp-witted without being cruel and humour pervades everything she does.

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A Shot in the Dark is about the murder of a theatre critic. It is the first in a series of comic crime novels set in Brighton in 1957 and features Inspector Steine, Sergeant Brunswick and Constable Twitten - the irony being Twitten is the clever and ambitious one.

The book, like Truss, is fun and funny - laughter rang round this venue as Truss talked about grammar, football - she was a sports writer for a time - and her life as a woman of a certain age.

Her crime writing has a touch of MC Beaton as well as much that is original. The good things for fans that there are at least three more books in this series and, if Truss' ambitions are realised, there will be six.