An interesting interview with author, David Scott Milton

grow. I also love and enjoy my two kids with something close to madness. Anything I do with them is fun, whether it's a trip to an amusement park, a sporting event, the movies, picnics, plays, concerts, or restaurants. I am literally reliving my childhood and teen-age years through my kids!

SUITE: Do you have a favorite author/authors?

DAVID: Indeed. I've mentioned Georges Simenon. I adore him and have read almost everything he has written, both his "entertainments", his mysteries, and his more serious novels; and that's saying something, since he's written over 400 books. I love the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov. Isaac Babel. Dostoyevksy. Shakespeare. James Joyce. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. My favorite novelist of the late 20th Century is Richard Yates. I worship Vladimir Nabokov. Pure mystery writers-Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, and the hardboiled detective stuff of Hammett and Chandler, as well as more recent authors such as Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman and Scott Turow. And I still remember with great affection, S.S.Van Dine's Trents Last Case.

SUITE: A book or author that influenced you a lot? Personally or professionally.

DAVID: I go back to-does this surprise you?- Georges Simenon. I saw my first Maigret movie, The Man on the Eiffel Tower, when I was fifteen. I immediately sat down and read two or three dozen of his novels. And I wrote my first novel, set, where else?, in Paris under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, shortly thereafter. Whenever I'm about to start a new novel, I always read some Simenon. Incidentally, as far as I know-and I could be wrong-The Man on the Eiffel Tower is the only American film to feature Inspector Maigret, though a hundred or so have been made around the world. And if someone asks you who the actor was who played Maigret in that film, it was Charles Laughton. If I were to try to name a single book which has had the most influence on me, I might say Joyce's Ulysses or Nabokov's The Gift. However, there have been so many books that have been important to me and have influenced me that as soon as I begin to think about it my brain begins to vibrate and I fear an attack of grand mal...No, that's for Dostoyevsky-for me it would be petite mal.

SUITE: Favorite mystery movie?

DAVID: And Then There Were None, certainly the best of the Agatha Christie films. I think Sleuth is

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