Croissant Exupery

Many years ago, I invented a Detective - a salute to the great Christie.  He was to be called Croissant Exupery (he would be French, to Hercule Poirot's Belgian) and would have a sidekick called Hotson,

As I remember, it was part of my Wuthering Frights series - in which the Bronski sisters would consistently fail to write their best seller/blockbusting movie script etc, but their quiet and studious brother Branston, who they thought had been doing his homework in the back room, was going to surprise them with a sizzling best seller of his own.  Their gimmicky detective - Croissant - was going to be hopeless at solving anything.

My sisters and I used to have writing evenings, many years ago, when we all lived in the same town. And I wrote a few of the Wuthering series to amuse them - or to amuse myself at least.   There was a bottle of wine involved in those evenings, but we are now all in print.

Only I thought of those evenings, and Croissant and his detective skills, yesterday when I walked to Lidls.  I usually arrive by car, and so from the carpark, but, on foot, I arrived at a different door - the Out door, not the In door.   I was baffled for a while as I walked up to it, tried to get it open, pushed at it, walked up to it again, wondering why it didn't work automatically.   The door did have a big red notice saying "NO ENTRANCE", but I failed to pick up on that vital clue.  And so I wondered if old Croissant would have done any better.