KEY POINTS:
The former England cricket captain Ted Dexter co-authored a crime novel, Testkill, in which a player is murdered during a match at Lords.
Dexter cut a sufficiently dashing figure to persuade Ian Fleming that he would have made a good James Bond but perhaps didn't have the eye for detail needed to construct a deft plot: as chairman of selectors he persistently referred to Devon Malcolm, his unguided missile of a pace bowler, as Malcolm Devon.
The investigation into the death of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer suggests that this may be a case of life imitating schlock.
But the unfortunate Woolmer provided his own epitaph.
Discussing the coach's lot with New Zealander John Wright, who was coaching India at the time, Woolmer concluded: "There are no happy endings."
When Woolmer's death was being treated as an everyday tragedy much of the discussion centred on the supposedly unique and inhuman stress generated by Pakistan's fanatical fans, vicious media, and highly political and capricious administrators.
Inhuman, perhaps; unique, certainly not.
Wright endured and more or less survived similar pressures during his four-and-a-half year stint with India, and John Hart must have allowed himself a sardonic smile this week if he happened to catch certain media identities deploring the way Pakistanis treat their coaches.
After the 1999 Rugby World Cup a magazine put Hart's face on the cover with the single word "Guilty" underneath.
He was vilified on talkback radio; he received hate mail, including death threats; at Addington Raceway people threw things at his horse.
Thereafter he was effectively cut adrift by the rugby community despite his contribution to the All Blacks' greatest achievements in recent times - winning the World Cup in 1987 and the first series win in South Africa in 1996. These days, not surprisingly, his sporting home is the Warriors rugby league club.
The other big story out of the Caribbean was the disgrace of English vice-captain Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff.
This didn't come as a shock to insiders because, as they were quick to reveal while the drunken sailor mumbled mea culpas for the cameras, he'd been rapped over the knuckles for similar behaviour three times on the recent tour of Australia.
Which raises a number of questions, not the least of which is why didn't those journalists in the know report it at the time?
Perhaps because all three blow-outs took place during the triangular one-day series which England won and throughout which Flintoff bowled superbly and led from the front.
There's no suggestion he was off the leash during the test series when England were flogged and he failed to live up to his reputation.
There are basically two schools of thought on the Flintoff affair: the censorious and the indulgent. Spokesman for the latter was former England all-rounder Ian Botham, who seems to be Flintoff's role model both on and off the field and who accompanied him on his Australian sprees. Botham has some credibility on this subject having scored a century against India in Mumbai in 1980 after staying up most of the night drinking cognac with a journalist. He also took 13 wickets in that match.
One might also cite the precedent of the French rugby player - and doctor - Lucien Mias, who was discovered wandering around the team hotel with a near-empty bottle of brandy the night before leading France to a historic victory over the Springboks at Ellis Park.
My favourite story of sportsmen on the turps involves the former England prop Colin Smart - a misnomer if there ever was one - who was conned into downing his complimentary bottle of aftershave at a post-match banquet. (He thought he was copying another player but the trickster had replaced his aftershave with water.)
As Smart was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped, a team-mate observed: "Colin's in a bad way but his breath smelled lovely."
Some detected hypocrisy in the Flintoff case, pointing out that in the protracted celebrations which followed England's 2005 Ashes victory the player turned on a bravura display of public drunkenness.
Highlights included allegedly urinating in the garden of Number 10 Downing Street and wandering around Piccadilly Circus with the word "tw ... " scrawled on his forehead.
By the time his hangover abated he'd become a folk hero.
The case for the prosecution was forcefully put by the Independent's outstanding sports columnist James Lawton: "The culture of modern English sport is riddled with an unwillingness to pay the price of success at the highest level."
"The most onerous one for a young, rich athlete is personal discipline, an understanding that getting to the top is a signal for the commitment, and sacrifice, to intensify rather than decline."
All Blacks take note.
