Word: sleuth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Westerns and private-eye shows offer escape into a world where men are men and women know their place. But situation comedies-which, this season, seem destined to outweigh saddle and sleuth operas-have a far more obscure and disturbing appeal. In their denatured apotheosis of Booth Tarkington and Clarence
...coincidence. And when it turns out that most of the men on Adrian Messenger's list have died by violent accidents, even the authorities are clever enough to make the same deduction. The pages that follow are full of top-chop cloak-and-Luger writing, and Sleuth Anthony Gethryn has some uncomfortable moments before he tracks down an adversary fully as brilliant and soulless as that slippery Conan Doyle wrongo, Professor Moriarty...
MURDER IN BLACK LETTER, by Poul Anderson (182 pp.; Macmillan; $3.50) presents an amateur sleuth who is a professor of Renaissance literature, a judo expert, and a nervous wreck. Black depression over the death years before of his sister overtakes him at odd moments, and, as one character says in admiration, "every couple of years Kintyre spends a few days in hell." But when a young graduate student is tortured and killed just before publishing a thesis on witches in 14th century Italy, Kintyre shakes his gloom and sniffs after the killers. Author Anderson creates a spooky San Francisco cityscape...