Word: gothic
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...chateau itself, looming against the skies of Languedoc, looks like the scene of a Gothic melodrama. Turkeys roost on the veranda, and assorted dogs and cats prowl the courtyard where lilacs bloom. In an unburied coffin lies the late Baron Léonce de Portal, whose family title dates back seven centuries. The new baron, Jean-Louis de Portal, has been holding off the police at rifle point for more than six weeks...
Early in the 16th century, French barons (being saddled with the "barbarous" Gothic tradition) seemed as ignorant and vulgar to the Italians as, 400 years later, Texas barons were to the French. The Renaissance had to be imported to France. It came late, in the form of an international style known as Mannerism, and its arrival was largely due to a single patron, Francis...
...Thing of the Spirit) makes it seem so. George's devotion to the austringer's discipline may be a little crazed, but Crews suggests that any obsession is better than inane passivity. And the latter quality is all that George can see in the Southern Gothic remnants who make up his family and friends. As George passes through a series of farcial set pieces (a woozy pot-smoking session at a residence for Florida State University students, a ghastly 4 a.m. confrontation with an embalmer in a mortuary), everything except the hawk seems to him as phony...
...along the left bank of the Rhine River on the French-German frontier, the ancient city of Strasbourg (pop. 250,000), typifies the jarring blend of old and new that is Europe today. Thick-walled 17th century fortresses, built by the great French engineer Vauban, and a toweringly spired Gothic cathedral look down on postwar synthetic-rubber factories and petrochemical plants. Although 300 miles from the North Sea, Strasbourg is France's largest port for exports; Common Market-bred prosperity has all but erased old fears that the city might once again become the object of French-German rivalry...
SLEUTH'S MOST STRIKING features, as anyone who's seen the film or the original play will tell you, are the surprising deceptions which reveal themselves every half-hour or so. Andrew Wyke, an English mystery writer (Sir Laurence Olivier), is at his Gothic estate when his wife's lover, a hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), arrives. Wyke proposes a shrewd plot: he will help Tindle "steal" the Wyke jewels, in order to defraud the insurance company. But that, we find, is not quite Wyke's real goal. And, a still later clever-and-bold twist tells us what...