Word: assassination
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Agent 007 has come to pay his last respects to the shapely, black-veiled widow of a SPECTRE assassin. An oboe sighs mournfully. He goes to press her hand and bam! da-bam! bam!-a volley of brass suddenly screams bloody murder. Agent 007 knocks the widow head over high heels with a bone-jarring right cross to the jaw. Aha! Just as he thought: it was not the widow but the assassin himself. Accompanied by thumping kettledrums, 007 methodically works the villain over with karate punches and a well-placed kick, then strangles him to death. A clatter...
...difference between reactions to the Kennedy legend and the Johnson performance is even more dramatic abroad than at home. Johnson is regularly described by foreign left-wingers as a "man of blood" or a "cowboy murderer" or a "Texas assassin," who has "turned Viet Nam into a slaughterhouse." A middle-reading Athens journalist accuses Johnson of "blatant Goldwaterism." When it is pointed out that, had he lived, Kennedy would have had to make many of the same moves as Johnson, most foreign critics insist that he would have handled them differently, with more finesse. They concede that Johnson is brilliant...
...dedicated aficionados, El Cordobés' success has encouraged a group of imitators who threaten to transform bullfighting from a dramatic and highly emotional art into a crazy circus act. His imitators are even worse than he is. Significantly, one of them calls himself "The Disaster," another "The Assassin," and a third, whose outlandish caricature of the El Cordobés style has brought him warnings by bullfight authorities, fights under the name of "Little Banana." Last month at a town just outside Madrid, one young apprentice tried to introduce a new dimension to bullfighting by parachuting into...
...which has nothing much to do with what follows. It just seems irresistible to have a brainwashed Bond attempt to execute M. This is 007's first understandable failure to complete an assignment. But after that, there is the reliable villain with the strange name, Scaramanga, a master assassin who uses only a golden gun, believes in sexual intercourse before every murder, and has "a third nipple two inches below his left breast." There is the girl. Since there have already been twelve books, and since he never beds with the same type twice, 007 has to fall back...
...even more painless stratagem is to latch on to a mystery or thriller writer who is not yet widely known. Fleming and le Carré, of course, are old-gat. So are Britain's Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) and John Creasey (Death of an Assassin), whose books have been made into movies. Georges Simenon, the prolific French author whose Inspector Maigret has solved more than 60 book-length cases to date, has yet to win a mass following in the U.S., despite his fine ear for Gallic nuance and a geographer's eye for locale. One enterprising...