Word: benchleys
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Humorist Robert Benchley once divided the world into two groups...
...PETER BENCHLEY 301 pages. Doubleday...
This year the book trade's hot-stove league has throbbed with several questions: Can Peter Benchley snatch defeat from the Jaws of victory? Will Nicholas Meyer's new Holmesian spoofery match The Seven-Per-Cent Solution? Answers are now available, and they seem...
...Benchley was aiming at the same primitive cortex he stumbled over in Jaws, he missed it. Yet The Deep is a better book-more cleverly plotted, less awkward when it ventures on dry land. David and Gail Sanders spend their honeymoon diving for curiosities off the coast of Bermuda and scuba right into trouble. They uncover a vast cache of morphine and opium-medical supplies lost when an Army cargo vessel went down in 1943. A black mobster on the island gets wind of their find and threatens the couple with death-and worse -unless they help him get nefarious...
...Benchley doles out this tale in the standard measures of escapist fiction: ever escalating shocks at predictable intervals. Early on, the effect can be ludicrous: Will David get stuck in an elevator? Will his wife accidentally drink a glass of hydrochloric acid? What is the meaning of her mysterious nosebleed? Later the blood flows everywhere and the sea is awash with gore: "The moray struck, needle teeth fastening on the man's neck, throat convulsing as it pulled back toward the hole. Blood billowed out of the sides of the moray's mouth." That moray eel, which figures...