Q: Who are the authors, critics, poets, musicians, or artists you admire?
A: That’s a lot to bite off. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, on and on. Classic American fiction writers: Melville, Wharton, James, Faulkner, Cather, Hemingway, Baldwin, Ellison, Larsen, Fitzgerald. Modern fiction writers: Marilynne Robinson, Charles Portis, Cormac McCarthy, Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Edward St. Aubyn, Kent Haruf, Larry McMurtry. I love The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G. B. Edwards and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston. They are essentially frontier writers. Poets: my American squeezes are Dickinson, Frost, and Billy Collins.
Q: Who are your favorite mystery writers?
A: I admired Tony Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries long ago. Hillerman was an Oklahoma native. I met and talked with him when I worked at the University of New Mexico. Gentle man, good listener. His detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, are calm men with a good sense of humor. I also like the Dave Brandstetter series by Joseph Hansen and K. C. Constantine’s Mario Balzic crime novels. Georges Simenon’s thrift and eye for telling detail stick with me.
Q: What about giving any spoilers away … What can readers expect from the next Maytubby/Bond adventure?
A: Maytubby and Bond investigate the apparently random murders of two upstanding citizens. The detectives tail a smuggling ring camouflaged by a vending-machine business.
Q: Is there a particular question that you wish an interviewer would ask you? What would your answer be?
A: What is your granddaughter’s newest word? “Elbow.”