The novelist and screenwriter Alun Richards from Pontypridd was a consummate producer of fine sentences, which in turn powered and coloured half a dozen novels, two cracking collections of short stories, along with stage plays, screenplays and TV series, including The Onedin Line, which took many viewers grippingly out to sea.   In real life Richards wove his fine sentences into expansive, heart conversations, fuelled by great bonhomie and perhaps an early afternoon cocktail, stirred not shaken, the Mumbles way.

 

Home to an Empty House, first published in 1973, is a little belter of a novel, with many, many of those trademark Richards’ lines, which are often side-splittingly funny and oftentimes deliciously scabrous.  I can’t remember laughing so much in aeons.