Word: roguish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...honesty, as if no one had ever before told a detective story. And perhaps, if it is honesty that is to be considered, no one has. The detectives are good cops, and convincingly so. But the author can see no other kind; even his bribe takers are merely roguish leftovers from an era when gaslight softened the ugly look of graft. An artist as skilled as Dougherty should know that the boys in blue come in other shades...
Parallel Lines. At first sight, Charlie Carmody seems to have the gusto of Frank Skeffington, the roguish politician (modeled on James Michael Curley) who ran away with the earlier novel. But Charlie dwindles into a gabby stage Irishman. Father Kennedy promises to be one of Graham Greene's degraded but tormented priests. Instead, his anguish is smothered in resignation, and his vocation is feeble. Compared with The Last Hurrah, this novel is a kind of lost begorra...
Seven Plays, by Bertolt Brecht. Roguish laughter, a cynic's sneer, tears of compassion, and a lacerated concern with the spectacle of man selling his fellow...
Seven Plays, by Bertolt Brecht. Roguish laughter, a cynic's sneer, tears of compassion, and a lacerated concern with the spectacle of man selling his fellow man keep exciting, if contradictory, company in the works of this remarkable playwright...
...speakers of Irish English (the barroom Irish of Manhattan's Third Avenue are tedious professionals) and with the talkers of Elizabethan England, if their playwrights bear true witness. In writing about such magnificent lingoists, color threatens to overwhelm shape, as it very nearly did in Naipaul's roguish first novel, The Mystic Masseur. In these sketches about Port of Spain, he lets shape find its own way home. This makes it hard to tell just how good a writer he may be, but the color, at least, is brilliant...