Word: sleuth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just how and when this happened is still a mystery, but no one is better qualified to sift through the widely scattered clues than McGovern, a skilled scientific sleuth who wields the most powerful tools of modern chemistry in his search for the roots of ancient wines. In 1996, for example, his lab created a stir by finding dried traces of wine in 7,500-year-old jugs that hailed from the Zagros Mountains of present-day Iran. A few years later his lab identified some of the key constituents in a funerary feast held in about...
That's the crime, or one of them anyway. Our sleuth is a low-grade Bangkok detective named Sonchai Jitpleecheep. Jitpleecheep is a devout Buddhist, and his firm belief in reincarnation and the transience of the physical world colors every aspect of his investigation. "We do not look on death the way you do, farang," he tells us, using the Thai word for foreigner. "Would you be sorry about a sunset?" Jitpleecheep is also half American and half Thai, which makes him uniquely qualified to understand both the tourists lured by the promise of sex, money, drugs and contraband jade...
...Died. Nicolas Freeling, 76, British crime writer whose Dutch detective character Piet Van der Valk and French sleuth Henri Castang propelled dozens of popular novels; in eastern France. Freeling wrote nearly 40 books and was credited with elevating the crime genre by creating probing examinations of complex personalities...
...honor is nothing new for a craftsman who, in 40 busy film years, has embodied the phrase "working actor." Caine has been nominated three times before as Best Actor (for Alfie, Sleuth and Educating Rita), without a victory, and won twice as Sup-porting Actor (Hannah and Her Sisters, The Cider House Rules). But the Quiet American citation is richly earned. Even Caine might think he deserves, if not an Oscar, a medal of honor for doing justice to Graham Greene's 1955 novel and tunneling into the murky life of its protagonist, the Englishman Thomas Fowler. "The role...
DIED. ALLEN WALKER READ, 96, Language sleuth who hunted down the origin of words, including the initials O.K., which, he discovered, first appeared as an abbreviation, "O.K.--all correct," in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, a time when initials and misspellings, like "oll korrect," were oll the rage...