An interesting interview with author, David Scott Milton

is a wonderful film, though the stage play is even better. Hitchcock's Frenzy is a keeper. The French production, Inspector Maigret, while not a great film brought us Jean Gabin as Maigret and he was so good that I began collecting smoking pipes as he did in the film. There are several scenes where Maigret's pipe collection is on view and I aspired to have a collection as spectacular and eventually succeeded. I also started to write Jake Baker Makes a Mistake after seeing the film. Another favorite is The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston. At the end, when Humphrey Bogart prepares to turn Mary Astor in for murder, she begs him for their love not to do it. He says something like, "Maybe in twenty years, sweetheart, when you get out of Tehachapi, we can get back together..." Tehachapi, where I now live, housed the women's prison for California. It's now a men's maximum security prison. It's where I teach my creative writing class to a dozen murderers and it's where The Fat Lady Sings is set. The Asphalt Jungle, also directed by Huston, is not strictly speaking a mystery movie, but it's a good, hard-boiled caper film and features Marilyn Monroe in her first real part and an array of wonderful character actors. It was adapted from a W.R. Burnett novel, the same W.R. Burnett who wrote Little Caesar and Kid Galahad. If there was anyone better at tough, dark, gangster fiction I don't know who it was; he must have had a dozen of his novels adapted to film.

SUITE: Favorite mystery TV show? If you don't have a favorite mystery one, then some other type of TV show that is a favorite.

DAVID: I liked Columbo, but never watched it faithfully. Incidentally, Dick Levinson, who was one of the creators of the show (and a friend), was also a Maigret fan and told me that Columbo was greatly influenced by Maigret. I've enjoyed some of the cop shows, but for the most part I don't watch much episodic television. It may go back some years when, for a very short while, I was the story editor on Starsky and Hutch. That cured me of any desire I might have had to write for television-or watch those shows, for that matter. I exaggerate, but not too much. In the past decade or so, there have been some remarkably good episodic shows-I

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