The most important part of a story is the ending. No one reads a book to get to the middle.
Mike Hammer drinks beer because I can't spell Cognac.
No one likes my books except the public.
I started off at the high level, in the slick magazines, but they didn't use my name, they used house names. Anyway, then I went downhill to the pulps, then downhill further to the comics.
Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.
I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead.