I loved Agatha Christie, of course. And also, an American team called Ellery Queen. I read a lot of Ellery Queen. Erle Stanley Gardner. I must have read 40 books by Erle Stanley Gardner before I was 15 or so. So, I got the reading habit, and I slightly branched out, you know, and challenged myself. I remember at the age of 15 going into the library and pulling down The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and reading it because I had heard that this was a modern masterpiece. So, it was random reading, but maybe that’s the best kind in a way. It’s not forced on you and you get these glimpses, you know, of a wonderful world of books. In Reading there was a lovely Carnegie-endowed library with walls of books, and I remember I read through a whole shelf of P.G. Wodehouse. Again my taste was to humor, I think, and it’s odd that I didn’t become a humorist really, although — just some humor perhaps in my work — but my first ambition as a writer was to become a humorous writer, to be like Thurber and Benchley and the lighter E.B. White, you know, to make people laugh. I thought that was a harmless thing to do. A thing that society never could have too much of, laughter. Anyway, I did a lot of reading. I remember I used to lie on this old sofa with a box of raisins, and I’d read as many as two books in one afternoon and eat maybe — I hope not the whole box — but a fair amount of the box of raisins. That was my diet for a while.