A crime to miss them

GOOD NEWS is no news, as they say, so you may not have heard that crime rates have been steadily falling over the last decade or so, particularly in the US, Britain and Ireland.

No one seems to understand why, so let’s posit a theory: everyone’s too busy staying home to watch the glut of TV crime.

“In the real world, as it’s called, we are constantly assailed with news and images of extreme violence,” says John Banville, author of a series of crime novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.