Word: archer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...toad. The eye looks out for itself; the rude and frequently ugly support systems of truth and beauty need all the help they can get. There is, of course, a long history of the artist as freak and invalid: Plato's ideas of divine mania; Philoctetes, the archer of Greek mythology, whose festering wounds made him unfit company; 19th century Romanticism with its conspicuous consumptives; more recently, Susan Sontag's musing on the literary uses of cancer in Illness as Metaphor...
...does an honorable Englishman comport himself? Deighton's engaging, complex hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, 30, carries on, tackling the tricky homicide cases for which he is celebrated (the Pimlico bread knife slaying, the Great Yarmouth seafood murder). Now, however, Oxonian Archer and his boozy, street-smart assistant, Detective Sergeant Harry Woods, are working directly under Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman, senior SS officer and police chief of Great Britain. Unlike his compatriots, the Yard man is free to move around at will in a prewar Railton automobile; he gets German-issue cigarettes, frequent dollops of real Highland Scotch...
Because he keeps the murder rate down, Archer keeps receiving such indulgences from Kellerman, a deceptively jolly Bavarian who affects the tweedy foibles of an English squire. Inevitably, it is bruited about that the Superintendent is Gestapo; he narrowly escapes two assassination attempts by the Resistance...
...Super's upper lip remains stiff until, on the trail of a London killer, Doug las locates a clandestine German atomic installation on England's south coast. Struggling to find his bearings in a maze of intrigue and counterintrigue, Archer joins a Resistance conspiracy to spirit the King out of the country and the atomic secrets into American hands. Things do not work out that simply. No Len Deighton plot ever does. In his unraveling, the au thor of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin produces a series of memorable set pieces. In one celebrating German-Soviet...
Yeah, I was there. Mr. First Nighter. Masquerading as Army Archer but feeling like George Archer. Walking in the footsteps of Rex Reed but as out of place as Willis Reed...