As a boy, I read voraciously, almost anything I could get my hands on, but I enjoyed adventure stories the most. I wasn't one of those unhappy kids who loses himself in books. I was a pretty happy kid who did it. We had a summer cottage in Quebec. My grandmother would come up on weekends, bringing me a kind of popcorn I liked and a stack of books. There would be famous ones, like Treasure Island, and not-so-famous ones, like Red Pete the Ruthless. I can still recall the last scene of that one--Red Pete, buried up to the neck between the high and low tide lines, surrounded by his stolen gold, waves lapping closer. Can't you just hear the hiss of the bubbles? I could, even if the writer hadn't bothered to imagine that part. I loved a powerful story.

And still do, but I became much more demanding in my reading. Besides all the usual things - depth of characterization, atmosphere, the telling details--I grew to want that extra something that's so hard to pin down, related to the voice of the writer and the resonance of the story, which I think of as the spirit of the book. So many novels have none at all, but the great ones--Pale Fire, The Comedians, Crime and Punishment to name a few that affected me--glow with it.

Nabokov is one of my favorites. The sheer brilliance! He makes it look so easy. I wonder what writers he read after the age of forty, say. Any writers at all, other than himself? Why bother?

Closer to my own field, I've been influenced by Graham Greene. I refer especially to what he called his entertainments. They are crime novels as far as I'm concerned (A Gun for Sale, Stamboul Train, Brighton Rock), and that's what I do. One of the problems in crime fiction is the evanescence of the reading experience, how light these stories--no matter how crammed with noir--really are. Greene's are weighty, and what momentum he establishes when they get going! With Greene, there's also the voice, so sympathetic at times, at other times off-putting, often both at once. I love how he does that.

In my teens and twenties, I read all of Ross MacDonald's books. The criticism of him--that he wrote the same story over and over--is probably true, but it doesn't matter to me. The series, unlike so many others of the kind, got better and better. I think the secret was in the development of the main character, Lew Archer. Ross MacDonald didn't "develop" him by having him blabber his inner feelings, or make friends with the disadvantaged, or any of the other gambits readers of series fiction are probably familiar with. Lew Archer didn't "grow" like that. He grew as a human being--saw more, understood more, forgave more, so that the last books, so touching, are dominated by that humane outlook. I speak now of how I remember his work, because I recently reread one of his books that I recalled fondly, only to be disappointed.

But that's just another of the wonderful things about reading, this intimate and changing relationship between the book and the reader. No other form of entertainment--not movies, not TV, not the Internet--comes close for me. I feel very lucky that I've been able to add a few new stories to the collective body of written work.