1. What is Wolfe’s true Street address?

2. When was Wolfe born?

3. Did you really have Alec Woollcott in mind when you created Wolfe?

4. What is Wolfe reading these days?

5. Will Wolfe ultimately retire, as Holmes did? Expire?

6. Who would you like to see play the role of Archie if another Wolfe movie was made now?

7. Anyone in mind for Wolfe? E.g. Sebastian Cabot?

8. Will Archie marry eventually?

9. How do you feel about a Wolfe TV series?

10. Have you given any thought to writing an autobiography or a Wolfe Handbook, like C.S. Forester’s splendid Hornblower Handbook, to share with your public the agony and ecstasy of bringing your characters into being?

11. Is age a topic to avoid or do you want to say something about what kind of plans you have for future books, at a vigorous 82? Don’t forget, Titian was still painting magnificently at 100 when he was carried off by the bubonic plague. Verdi did Falstaff, the greatest of all comic operas, at 80. DeLessups married at 63 and had 12 children after that.

12. How do you work it out that each of your books has just about the same number of pages?

13. How’s the fan mail doing?

14. Whom do you rank among your favorites in the generation of detective story writes coming up?

15. Any word on sex and violence in modern detective fiction?

16. Do you choose your own titles?

17. Any advice for the aspiring detective story writer?

3. No. I had no one in mind.

4. GRANT TAKES COMMAND by Bruce Catton, THE KINGS DEPART by Richard M. Watt, THE COMPLEAT FLEA by Brendan Lehane, HISTORIES by Polybius, COLLOQUIES BY Erasmus.

5 & 8. How do I know? Ask them.

6, 7&9. For year I have refused all offers from movie and television producers, and shall go on refusing. I wouldn’t trust either of those media with JACK AND THE BEANSTALK if I had written it.

10.No. Any man who writes an autobiography thinks too much of himself.

11. I neither avoid nor press “age as a topic”. As with all topics, its attractiveness depends on who’s talking. I have never had plans for future books. Around the last
of October I’ll start writing a story and see how it goes.

12. I don’t “work it out”. My subconscious probably knows, but we’re not on speaking terms.

13. Much too much, since courtesy requires that letters be acknowledged. Much too little, since self-esteem is a glutton.

14. I seesaw from book to book – not the ones I write, those I read.

15. Sex and violence, like all other items of human behaviour, are acceptable and desirable in a detective story if they are essential to the story.

16. Yes

17. Only if I have read something he has written and formed an opinion as to whether it’s worth the trouble.