Word: dr.
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None of which should deter potential readers; surely it's no longer a shock to discover that celebrities sometimes seek a little polish for their memoirs. And in this case, well, let's cut a chimp some slack here: Cheeta's screen career, which stretched right up to 1967 (Dr. Dolittle), called for a mastery of physical performance - mime, slapstick, acro- and aerobatics - not of stage English. Even his leading man, Tarzan, rarely ventured much beyond "Aaaheeyaaheeyaheeyaheeyah" or "Jane not worry." Now though, at the age of 76, and living out the last of his days in a Palm Springs...
...targets are dead, after all - Cheeta's comebacks have sharp teeth: Chaplin is a humorless "demi-ape"; Mickey Rooney gets pegged as "a cacophonous cartoon of glutinously faked ebullience" who basically stole Cheeta's act; and Rex Harrison ... well, frankly, his opinion of the gentlemanly English star who, as Dr. Dolittle, at least tried talking to the animals, is as mean-spirited as it is unpublishable on a family-oriented website. Far better is his elegant demolition of Mrs Fairbanks, who, he writes, was in truth "an absolute brick. I just didn't see in her that bloodcurdlingly shallow...
...apartment above the place. While living there, he got a first-hand look at the shocking dilapidation of the country's medical infrastructure. Years later, the experience would provide the inspiration for a series of charmingly offbeat mystery novels set in Laos and featuring a most unlikely detective: Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country's chief - and only - coroner...
...Dr. Siri certainly isn't your average gumshoe. For one thing, he's in his mid-70s, and feeling the weight of his years. But he does have a few advantages. He's able to commune with the spirits of the cadavers that pass through his morgue - "customers," as he calls them with characteristically mordant humor. And Dr. Siri is a cynic, naturally distrustful of the political cant mouthed by his communist-party superiors...
...fifth and latest Dr. Siri mystery, Curse of the Pogo Stick, is set in 1976, shortly after the communist takeover of Laos, and revolution is still very much in the air. The doctor, a former Pathet Lao guerilla who happens to have studied medicine in Paris, has been pressed, with much grumbling, into service as a coroner. Politics rudely intrudes when a body arrives in his morgue booby-trapped with a live grenade. Dr. Siri soon finds himself untangling a mystery involving Hmong insurgents, a possible demonic possession, and a plot by a female terrorist known as the Lizard...