Word: castang
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...Died. Nicolas Freeling, 76, British crime writer whose Dutch detective character Piet Van der Valk and French sleuth Henri Castang propelled dozens of popular novels; in eastern France. Freeling wrote nearly 40 books and was credited with elevating the crime genre by creating probing examinations of complex personalities...
...dramatic calorie count, the plot courts starvation. The setting is a drafty, government-sponsored art studio, a cross between a ratty garret and an army barracks. Several young men and women of working-class origin drift in. Their teacher, Allott (Kevin Conway), has come earlier, as has Stella (Veronica Castang), the nude model. As the students stand at their sketch boards, it is quickly apparent that they are wholly inept and could not tell Degas from dandruff. They are whiling away the days on a subsidized boondoggle, and for them art is what Writer Rose Macaulay once said...
...scene is the new exurbia outside Paris, where a saucy mini-gratte-ciel apartment building full of affluent city commuters not only scrapes the sky but rubs nearby villagers and the demoralized peasantry the wrong way. Henri Castang, Freeling's new sleuth, is a low-key public servant who, like Van der Valk, cites Proust and Dickens without sounding pretentious...
Hearing that Castang also could talk with apes, an enterprising Toronto Star reporter went out to the Riverdale Zoo, had a keeper install a handset telephone in the cage of chimpanzees George & Josephine, put through a long distance call to Castang's Chicago hotel. With a "semi-scream," Castang summoned Josephine to the phone. At his whimpering mimicry of the chimpanzee mating call. Ape Josephine first looked startled, then so pleased that Ape George, becoming angry, shouldered his mate from the phone, pulled frantically at the cage's bars. With a sharp cough-like cry, Castang cursed George...
...Said Castang after the chat: "I didn't do very well. I don't know those apes, you know, and it's hard even to speak to a man to whom you've never been introduced...