Word: spiv
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Cheat. Dangerfield, like his creator Donleavy, gets to Dublin's Trinity College as a student on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Unlike Brooklyn-born Writer Donleavy, a Navy vet who studied natural science at Trinity, Dangerfield is a spiv student of law who cheats at his exams, cheats on his wife Marion (whom he calls "a scheming slut"), cheats a succession of easy conquests, from barmaids to old maids. When one of them laments "It's adultery," Dangerfield comforts her: "One mortal sin is the same as another." He is the pest of the Coombe, Dublin...
...ROCK, by Francis King (248 pp.; Pantheon; $3.50), is based on the fact that the human comedy is seldom humane. British Novelist Francis King, 34, pitches his inhumane comedy on the rise and fall of a young Greek spiv of the postwar dead-beat generation. The book's larger theme is the old motif of American innocence v. European corruption. Reflected in the golden eye of a Mediterranean setting, what is sordid and depraved becomes corrosively hilarious. Spiro Polymerides is a sun-baked peasant Apollo. He is taken up by an arty, effeminate, high-minded official...
...FLYING BOX, by Mary McMinnies. An astonishingly good first novel about fumbling Britons who still pretend that they are carrying the white man's burden in Malaya. The decline and fall of Empire is measured by the spurious successes of a black-marketeering London spiv who finds loot among the ruins...
...Gogol published the first part of his greatest work. Dead Souls, a novel that brilliantly exposed a brutal anachronism of Russian life: serfdom. Serfs, like any other property, could be mortgaged. Gogol introduced a sort of Russian spiv who speculated in "dead souls,'' i.e., defunct but still financially negotiable persons...
...kamikazes." To enforce the law in their burgeoning metropolis, Tokyoites have the services of 22,334 policemen (now equipped with nightsticks and U.S.-made .38-cal. revolvers instead of swords). One of the police force's biggest headaches: a spreading rash of crimes of violence by the spiv and Teddy-boy element of the city's 350,000 students, whose favorite weapons are knives and bicycle chains...