Word: plotters
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Until last week, Americans had seen Mohammed Abul Abbas Zaidan, better known as Abul Abbas, only in a few still photographs and snippets of TV footage. The accused plotter behind last fall's hijacking of the Achille Lauro and hence a suspect in the murder of cruise ship Passenger Leon Klinghoffer, Abbas is on most-wanted lists in the U.S., Italy and Israel. Suddenly, however, the elusive Palestinian showed up on American television last week. In exchange for the exclusive 3 1/2-min. interview, NBC News executives agreed not to disclose Abbas' whereabouts, an arrangement that stirred up almost as much...
Elmore Leonard gives this piece of business a nice wrinkle by delaying the punch line for eleven pages. Don't ask how; the ploy works like the rim shot of a drummer perking up a lounge comic's routine. Leonard may not be the tightest plotter on the popular thriller circuit, but he is the writer who pays closest attention to getting the tacky details right. Bribing a night clerk with a greasy cheese-steak sub is something that could happen only in the Philadelphia-South Jersey axis of ethnic indigestibles...
Wilson, former literary editor of London's weekly Spectator and biographer of the humorist and Roman Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, is a lightning plotter. The action, however, is never as arresting as those who initiate it. The smitten Hughie is a striking example of what the author calls "an overdeveloped inner life." Bernadette is a stinging portrait of stupidity (a pimp recruits her with veiled threats, and she mistakes him for a social worker). Blore is an overbearing ass who makes a big production about serving a modest Spanish wine and talks of W. Somerset Maugham...
Brezhnev was his country-genial, brutal, boring. He had the face of both plodder and plotter, being something of each; a scholar's face and a doorman's, the kind one does not notice until it is in charge of things. In the West one saw him mostly in photographs: clapping solemnly at parades, his chest tiered with medals, his body like a metalwork; or embracing a world leader...
...Charlie come across as tender and courageous victims; even some of the stooges, notably a half Cherokee named John Rainbird, show complexity and charm. Though he is not an elegant writer - he is addicted to such objurgations as "You blind, obsessive fools" - Maine-based Stephen King is a superb plotter with a fine eye for terrain and, indeed, pyrotechnical detail...