In mystery, James Lee Burke, who is the greatest living mystery author, and Ross Macdonald, who is the greatest of the ones who have passed on.
Outside mystery, it would be P.G. Wodehouse, the poet E.E.Cummings, and Dickens. Bleak House is the greatest novel in the English language.
2.Who has had a major influence on your writing?
Burke and Macdonald would be huge influences - Burke for the beauty of his prose, and Macdonald for his emphasis on empathy and compassion - and I wouldn't be writing without them.
3.Name a book you never finished?
I tend to persevere with books, so there aren't many, but The Brothers Karamazov has repeatedly defeated my attempts to get to grips with it.
4.What word or words do you always have trouble spelling?
I tend not to repeatedly spell words wrongly, but I was quite surprised to discover that "dilemma" didn't have an 'n' in it.
5.What three adjectives best describe you?
Angry, happy, sad.
6.Which of your characters would you want to be and why?
I think there's a little bit of me in all of the characters that I write, good and bad, but there's more of me in Parker and in David, the protagonist of The Book of Lost Things. I'd quite like to be Louis in the Parker books, if it was okay to be a straight Louis, but I think I'm closer to Angel.
7.Which author would you invite to dinner?
There are a couple I'd invite just so I could poison them, but I'd love to have met James Thurber, so perhaps him.
8.Where do you write?
In the little office space at the top of my house, usually with one or both of our dogs sleeping nearby, but I'm getting better at snatching an hour in a coffee shop when I have to.
9.When do you write?
Usually from morning until early afternoon, but I tend to set myself a target of words to write, or chapters to revise, so I'll work whenever - and for however long - I have to to get the work done.
10.What makes you happy?
Having written, but not necessarily writing; and walking the dogs.
11.What do you most fear?
Being late. And cancer.
12.What is your favorite vice?
Wine, but I stopped viewing that as a real vice a long time ago.
13.What is the quality you most like in yourself?
Perseverance. In terms of qualities I demonstrate towards others, I guess I'm not mean. I don't like tight-fisted people.
14.What are the qualities you most like in your friends?
Tolerance for my failings.
15.Would you be lying if you said your works were not autobiographical?
There has to be a huge personal element in what you write, otherwise it's not worth the effort, so in that sense I would be lying.
16.What part of your personality do you detest?
Impatience. And detesting things.
17.What is your favorite adjective?
Cthonic, which describes something connected to the Underworld.
18.What is your favorite book?
It changes. Today, it's probably James Thurber's The Years With Ross.
19.What book would you read three times?
I've only reread a handful of books, but The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is among them.
20.To whom would you award the Nobel Prize for Literature and why?
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