Word: spaded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...flawless public performance is all the more admirable for hiding his true nature: short-fused, outspoken, archconservative. As a senior British official who knows him well puts it, "He has all the prejudices of a white Englishman of his age and social standing." Notes a friend: "Denis calls a spade a bloody shovel, though these days he does it privately. It requires an almost superhuman effort for him to keep the old mouth shut in public. Loyalty to Margaret and common sense make...
...barmaids--Amanda Pleasme (Michael Starr '90) and Sheila Lowitt (Donivan Barton '91)--start the show in the finest Roaring Twenties fare, in a dazzling tap dance that sends their fringes fluttering and foam chests bouncing. A Sam Spade archetype, detective Sam Antics (Jason Tomarkin '91), lets the audience in on Cafe Ole's reputation as "a joint where nobody just says...
...throughout. His brief encounters with a series of Favorite's acquaintances lead to their grisly murders, and he becomes increasingly implicated in their unorthodox deaths. Thus, the tough private eye must disover the truth before he becomes a victim of the circumstances of his own investigation--a la Sam Spade...
Tough investigators are concentrated mostly in New York and in California, the Olduvai Gorge of the chivalrous gumshoe. By far the best known are the West Coast trio of Hammett's Sam Spade, Chandler's Marlowe and Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer. Occasional readers of the form tend to confuse Ross with John D. MacDonald and Gregory Mcdonald. The first was born Kenneth Millar in 1915 and died three years ago of Alzheimer's disease. The second is 69 and lives in Florida, as does his popular P.I. Travis McGee, the "tinhorn knight on a stumbling Rosinante from Rent...
...guard long enough to reveal a flash of erudition (Marlowe has atrocious taste in socks but can quote Browning). Touches of class cater to the tough-guy fantasies of the literati. Albert Camus, whose spare existential novels were influenced by U.S. detective fiction, looked like Humphrey Bogart portraying Sam Spade. Hemingway followed in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. But it is hard to read such terse narratives as The Killers and To Have and Have Not without imagining gumshoe tracks leading back to Black Mask magazine...