Word: sleuths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That ingredient can be found throughout Hermit of Peking, a model of historical detective work. The unfailingly literate sleuth is Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler and The Rise of Christian Europe, who has ventured far from his customary turf. In 1973, Trevor-Roper came upon two volumes of unpublished memoirs by Sir Edmund. The work appeared so outrageous, so incongruent with the accepted character of the author-it chronicled, in obscene detail, his amours with Chinese eunuchs and such European celebrities as Poet Paul Verlaine -that Trevor-Roper felt compelled to investigate the Backhouse background...
...tart and perceptive, with matching dialogue-not surprising from the man who wrote Born Yesterday and Adam's Rib. "You make me most uneasy," one of them remarks accurately at Kanin's snooping. "You seem detectivy, in a nasty way." Defeated by the complications he uncovers, the sleuth forsakes the project-as a screenplay...
...unless it's for something screwy like finding a kidnapped cat. This is the first key angle in Robert Benton's script: the once respected and feared detective who's fallen on fallen times. Then there's the other angle: the funny lady who actually does ask him to sleuth down her cat. The woman, Margo Sperling, is played by Lily Tomlin. Her character comes straight out of a stock bit she does on television specials and in night-clubs: the astrology nut, pseudo-psychoanalyst and perpetual high-on-lifer all rolled into one. When Welles flashes...
...indirect answers suggest not. When taking up these works, he treats O'Hara and Quinlan like any other "types." "In Touch of Evil, I was all on the side of Charlton Heston," he says. (Heston plays the Mexican sleuth who gets the goods on Quinlan). Besides, he adds, "I'm someone who likes to look...
...lived substantially for the past 13 years off writings and lectures attacking the Warren Commission, and Bernard Fensterwald Jr., who once represented James Earl Ray. Lane had the sense to bow out, but he recommended the man who was eventually appointed as the $39,600-a-year chief sleuth: Richard A. Sprague, 51, a tough-minded former district attorney from Philadelphia...