Whodunit?

I have a friend who used to own a bookshop. It was a lifelong ambition so that when he had the chance to take a redudancy package he used it to set up the shop. I bought stuff there from time to time and I spent time in there just chatting and browsing but another customer was a rare thing indeed, in spite of a nice high street location. It's long closed now - replaced, if memory serves, with a knitting shop - and Dave is back in insurance. These are the perils of selling books from a shop in an age that wants downloads from the internet. I suppose the knitting shop will survive because it's impossible to download a woolly jumper.

I mention it because my favourite bookshop in the whole of London is no more. Murder One was, I'll admit, rather specialist, carrying only crime books. I get to London rarely but it's always been the first shop I visited and I never visited it without buying something - usually a bagful of Sherlock Holmes pastiches.

When I went there on Tuesday, it was gone. It was missing.

I've checked and it seems that it no longer exists. There is a brief page on their website which gives a new office address and the short but succinct message, "We are no longer a bookshop".

It's a great pity because I know of nowhere else that I can get those books, at least nowhere where I can pick them up, hold them, look at them, skim a couple of pages, read the cover blurb and then make an informed selection about which ones to buy.

I could possibly find them on the internet but in addition to not being able to do any of those things, I also have to know what I want to look for before I look for it. Just randomly browsing, in a pokey cellar packed floor to ceiling with crime novels, is no longer an option.

Murder One is dead. And I want to know who killed it.