Word: waughs
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...Fuel for the Flame, Waugh...
Seven years before his death in 1957, Knox appointed one such friend, Evelyn Waugh, novelist and fellow convert, as his literary executor. In Monsignor Ronald Knox (Little, Brown; $5), Biographer Waugh guards his friend's privacy like a medieval moat; whenever the book becomes personal, it is full of private jokes. Waugh's portrait is curiously Graham Greene-like, with Knox's outward urbanity masking a certain amount of inner anguish, his scrupulous conscience making him uneasy at any ease of faith...
Enter Lady Acton. As Waugh tells it, Knox was in depression toward the end (1939) of his Oxford chaplaincy. As a writer, he deplored what he referred to as two decades of potboiling. (Among other works he had churned out six popular detective novels to help foot the port-and-banana bills.) A glowing young convert, Lady Acton, and her husband gave Knox a psychological lift by offering him a writing retreat and private-chaplain status at their country estate, Aldenham. With this haven in view, Knox secured the English hierarchy's commission to translate the New Testament. From...
...gang of underaged cat burglars and the children blunder from success to pointless success, stealing trinkets for the excitement of it and giving them away. It is only after Charley is caught that Gary's book makes a descent into sentiment, coming closer to Dickens than to Evelyn Waugh, who also told (in his hilarious Put Out More Flags) of brattish evacuees on the loose in the English countryside. But the sentimental flaw is minor, and the book makes its point well: adolescence is a chrysalis whose occupant can be hurt, but not helped much, by the world outside...
SLEEP LONG, MY LOVE, by Hillary Waugh (192 pp.; Crime Club; $2.95), begins with the most traditional of all detective-story discoveries: the trunk in the trunk. It takes Fred Fellows, police chief in a small Connecticut town, several chapters merely to learn the identity of the dead blonde, or even that she is a blonde, since she has been separated from her head as well as her limbs. Spying out her falsehearted lover is an even tougher problem. Clever readers may spot the lady killer a few pages before the end, but the author has marked a fine trail...