Word: derring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dead Space. Kaufman does not hesitate to preach what he practices, irking conventional architects. "Handsome details and elegant proportions are meaningless," he says. "No one notices them; they fade into the canyon walls." He therefore deprecates Manhattan's architectural landmarks-Lud-wig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building and Eero Saarinen's CBS building, for example-calling them "gigantic sculptures that do nothing for the city. Look at their plazas. Dead spaces!" Their tragic flaw, he insists, is that the architects designed the ground floor to relate to the building rather than to the street, where...
...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...
...steady reader grows affectionately aware of Van der Valk's changing circumstances. His two sons grow up. He slowly mounts the bureaucratic ladder from simple detective to special commissaris. His wife, Arlette, keeps feuding over sweetbreads with her swinish butcher. In King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk is shot and nearly killed by a hysterical woman. He is seduced just once, in Ireland, but is miserable until he confesses it to Arlette...