You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
I read very little contemporary anything.
I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.