Word: derfully
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...enterprises launched in the hopeful '60s have been as successful as a square, spare gumshoe called Inspector Van der Valk. The humane Amsterdam police detective was the creation of Nicholas Freeling, a 45-year-old ex-hotel cook who put away his pots a decade ago and took to publishing suspense novels at the rate of one a year. Since then, Van der Valk has been probing characters, savoring cookery and solving crimes (mainly murder in high or low degree) around Holland and neighboring countries. Van der Valk books have attracted a steadily growing international audience and collected...
...der Valk is a plebeian with little formal education. But he reads a lot, looks hard at the world and thinks fast. He also has a blonde French wife who provides Gallic insight and underdone foie de veau, modifying her husband's tendency toward Dutch stolidity. In short, Van der Valk is the perfect medium through which Freeling, himself a multilingual, self-educated, cultural nomad, can express his own sharp-eyed perceptions of life. While getting on with the crime, readers are treated to idioms in several languages and quotes from the likes of Horace and Kipling. They...
...with Simenon's Inspector Maigret, exposure to Van der Valk is likely to prove infectious. Even when the story seems to unwind in slow motion, Van der Valk's reflective concern for the role of character in crime makes the trip worthwhile. The prizewinning Criminal Conversation (1966), for instance, presents an Amsterdam society doctor, highly intelligent but neurotic and febrile, who is unprovably guilty of murder. In a long series of informal conversations, Van der Valk, in effect, kills the man with kindness and understanding, finally inveigling him into admitting his crime by laying bare the poverty...
Less may be more, according to the new designers, but for Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's dictum to be true, as he well knew, careful attention must be paid to structure, to supports, to underpinnings. Barrie frankly uses narrow crisscross straps, back or front. Crahay of Lanvin hangs his backless clothes from tied stock collars. Donald Brooks has engineered foundations into his backless dresses, so secure that a woman can even "curtsy and not fall out," he claims. But for women who want to be both bared and bra-ed, complicated problems lie ahead. One possibility...
...government did its best to defend the scheme. "It compares favorably with white migrant laborers' accommodations overseas," said Van der Merwe. Nonetheless, mindful perhaps that a similar attempt at a "white by night" policy aroused such concern in the nearby town of Randburg that the ruling National Party suffered seriously in local elections, the Johannesburg city council decided to postpone the hostel opening for another two months. "We are putting in an open-air cinema, and the women's block will get a basketball court," explained an official. "We are also considering putting in heating...