Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...copyright on Gaston Leroux's 1911 thriller The Phantom of the Opera expired this year, plans were announced for no fewer than three competing musical adaptations. The flurry of interest was perplexing. Leroux's tale, part horror melodrama, part bodice-ripping gothic, seemed too grim and kinky for a musical. The central character is, after all, not only hideously ugly but an extortionist, kidnaper, incendiary and megalomaniac -- and the heroine must at least halfway fall in love with...
...compact -- and cozy: 180 pages of pure deduction and cardboard characters propped up in a long-gone rural England. Along with a handful of other contemporary crime writers including Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, 66, has gracefully shattered the rules. In her best and most ambitious tale to date, A Taste for Death -- her ninth mystery novel in 24 years -- James has become a kind of Le Carre of crime, blending the calmer depths of mainstream fiction with the white rapids of the genre, to produce something quite different indeed...
...tale goes as well with Reeboks and condominiums as Agatha Christie's puzzlers did with spats and country homes. In the '80s, not only the dead are ) victims: "Was this what murder did to the innocent?" wonders a bystander. "Took away the people they loved, loaded their minds with terror, left them bereft and unfriended under a smouldering sky." Dalgliesh's assistant, Inspector Kate Miskin, provides a counterpoint to the Tory values exemplified by most of the characters on both sides of the law. Miskin has risen from a council-flat childhood to an imitation of chic affluence. A visitor...
Last week provided a dramatic climax to this improbable real-life tale as Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, 77, now with the National Council of Scientific Research in Rome, and Stanley Cohen, 63, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The pair, who met in St. Louis in 1953 at Washington University, found the first of the body's many "growth factors": proteins that guide the development of immature cells. Said Nobel Committee Member Kerstin Hall: "Every single discovery in the field of cell growth factors has followed closely in the footsteps of Levi...
Author Richard Kluger, 52, is uniquely qualified to tell this tale. He was a Tribune editor during those final years. He has a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of journalism, acquired in jobs ranging from rewrite man on the Wall Street Journal to publisher of a suburban New York weekly. He is the author of Simple Justice (1976), an acclaimed history of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segregation in U.S. public schools. Kluger, who has also published fiction, brings a novelist's imagination to some vivid material...