Word: sleuthed
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...particularly original theme in this genre, but Orton doesn't strive for chills as Pinter did in Accident. Instead, he applies black humor within the blissfully sloppy and easy-going frame of character-types which are so familiar that they never really threaten to be ominous: The Sherlock Holmes sleuth who stalks, magnifying glass in hand, the unctuous undertaker who speaks of "floral tributes," the cool-as-ice nurse who hides a whopping sex drive. With characters such as these, each occupationally linked to death, but in funny, obsessive ways, Orton spins a yarn about stolen money which provides...
...perhaps an eccentric, but never a cartoon. Few writers would pass Maugham's test more handsomely than the late Margery Allingham, who, along with Dame Agatha Christie and the late Dorothy Sayers, dominated a golden age of suspense that began in England after World War I. Her aristocratic sleuth, Mr. Albert Campion, survived four decades, 20 books and dozens of malefactors before his creator died in 1966. Even then, he did not retire immediately. Allingham's plots are full of Lazaruses. Taking that as his cue, the author's husband, Philip Youngman Carter, revived Mr. Campion...
...Sleuth. A sophisticated and flawless murder mystery...
Present deponent will testify no further as to the plot. To say more would be a crime against pleasure and surprise. Among its bonuses, Sleuth is a consummate spoof of thrillers, as keen in satire as suspense. The evening moves from something like the erudite nonchalance of S.S. Van Dine to the venomous gaiety of the "get-the-guests" sequence in Virginia Woolf. In the key roles, Quayle and Baxter are lithe and lethal...
Core of Passion. Under its suavely British surface, Sleuth contains some bitterly anti-British sentiments. The celebrated games-playing vocabulary of the Englishwith terms like fair play and a sporting chanceis cant in Shaffer's view. It masks some bloody-minded bigotry and is no sounder a guide to the British national character than the ritualized tea ceremony is to that of the Japanese. Wyke is very pukka. Tindle is half Italian with a half-Jewish father. Wyke can be loftily amusing about this ("Some of my best friends are half-Jews...