The news that Mills & Boon will soon be penetrating the crime fiction market with as much vigour and tenderness as a Viking rapist, has somehow been met with indifference from the literary community. Not wanting to spoil the publisher of every housewife’s favourite masturbatory tool’s centennial celebrations, but is this move what the already over-saturated genre needs?

The only way we can see this working is if they use the same writers as their romance branch. At least then we’ll get to read about the equivalent of Kay Scarpetta lustfully caressing the naked body of a suave, sophisticated stranger as he lays dead in the gutter with a cut throat and blood sensually flowing down his perfectly-chiselled torso to form a pool around his flaccid, lifeless love truncheon. An eroticised autopsy does have a certain perverse appeal (we imagine), but the necrophilia genre is a niche market that is notoriously hard to break into. Hey, Mills & Boon, maybe it’d be best to just stick to what you’re good at.

The fact is that authoring a crime fiction novel is an involved process, which is heavily dependent on lots and lots of painstaking research. Can Mills & Boon’s lowest common denominator-style, churned-out novelettes achieve that standard? We very much doubt it. And, with that in mind, what is the point of this initiative other than a cynical ploy to make money at the cost of the industry?

Obviously, there’s room for every type of fiction on the bookstore shelves, both highbrow and popular – but there’s never an excuse for bad writing, and has anyone found themselves engrossed in a good Mills & Boon novel recently? Exactly. This is good news for nobody.