Last night I introduced the fantastic Robert Goddard, who was giving the NAW lecture at the Birmingham Book Festival. He's a speaker who can make a 500 seat auditorium seem like a living room, partly because he knows what he's talking about. A crime writer, he says, has to get things right. And to get things right, it helps to be the kind of person who protects detail like others feel for kittens. If temperamenally you enjoy searching out errors in ancient train timetables (Bradshaw's (d.1961) for maximum satisfaction) , you could do worse than try your hand at a crime novel. Also, it's always reassuring when at a public event a professional storyteller turns out to be brilliant at telling stories. The one