An author of spoofy, light-hearted mysteries, my friend Ruth Dudley Edwards has had unusual difficulty completing her new novel, Death of a Snowflake. The trouble isn’t lack of material —she’s spoilt for choice — but real life outpacing satire. As we now live in a world of ‘you could not make this stuff up’, readers looking for a laugh are spurning fiction in droves in preference for the newspaper.

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