Word: balkanize
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Dewing on Balkan Situation...
...example a drawing of Fujiyama with a tree in the foreground captioned "The Old Japan"; the same drawing with a cannon substituted for the tree, captioned "The New Japan." Author Van Loon's bright chapter headings catch the eye, may engage many a reader: "Bulgaria, the soundest of all Balkan countries, whose butterfly-collecting King bet on the wrong horse during the Great War and suffered the consequences"; "Rumania, a country which has oil and a royal family...
...rascal is Stephan Stephanovitch, absolute monarch of the minor Balkan kingdom of Illyria, as he sits in his shirtsleeves in the Royal Palace of Zeta playing chess with General Kosovo, his Prime Minister. Illyria is in a sad state of affairs. A foreign loan must be floated somehow, and without signing away the vast undeveloped oilfields at Tokar. Questions of the royal succession are also troubling Stephan. His eldest son Dushan had renounced his royal birthright to marry an American, and now is dead. Milan, the present Crown Prince, who shoots horses out of his way rather than walk around...
...more glaring unreality of their characters is a prerogative of mystery writers that constitutes many a mystery writer's entire stock-in-trade. A welcome exception is Author Gunther, who peoples his well-written murder story with characters recognizably alive. So lively are they, so picturesque is the Balkan political turmoil in which they agitate, that most readers will be more interested in their daily doings than in discovering which one of them murdered the two American boys. Just out of college, the boys were taking an innocent tramp through Europe, landed up by chance in Trapani, capital...
Cynical, experienced in Balkan wiles, the Rumanian police reconstructed the 41 murders thus: the woman lured the 40 men one by one to the villa of her man who slew each, robbed the corpse. Finally he slew her on the old Rumanian theory that "Dead women tell no tales...