Word: wyke
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SLEUTH'S MOST STRIKING features, as anyone who's seen the film or the original play will tell you, are the surprising deceptions which reveal themselves every half-hour or so. Andrew Wyke, an English mystery writer (Sir Laurence Olivier), is at his Gothic estate when his wife's lover, a hairdresser named Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), arrives. Wyke proposes a shrewd plot: he will help Tindle "steal" the Wyke jewels, in order to defraud the insurance company. But that, we find, is not quite Wyke's real goal. And, a still later clever-and-bold twist tells us what...
...Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier) is a wealthy member of the English gentry. He is also the author of a dozen novels about the aristocratic investigator St. John Lord Merridew and an obsessive games player whose home looks like a cross between Pollock's Toy Museum and a penny arcade. Milo Tindle (Michael Caine), a London hairdresser whose parents were Italian and-worse yet-Jewish, is the lover of Wyke's estranged wife. He comes by Wyke's stately home one afternoon to discuss a divorce. Wyke instead presses him into an intricate plot to defraud an insurance...
...riddles are not very concerned with the niceties of style and characterization; by contrast, a better writer "won't be bothered with the coolie labor of breaking down unbreakable alibis." Shaffer tries to escape this dilemma by concentrating first on the personal, then the class bitterness between Wyke and Tindle, but the intricacies of his plot hem him in; the bitterness, instead of a motive, seems like an excuse. Characters remain incidental to the contortions of plot...
Michael Allinson largely supports the play in his lead role as the successful mystery writer Andrew Wyke. Allinson struts around the stage like a long-legged bird secure on its own rocky turf, waving his arms and laughing from his belly while populating his imagination with his ace detective St. John Lord Merridew and a host of artful villains. Wyke's sixteenth century country house, the play's only set, is filled with bizarre paraphernalia. Among its pillars, arches, and cluttered bookcases sits a paper-mache automaton with a toothy smile. It laughs uproariously when Wyke activates it after each...
...Wyke has the opportunity to actualize a macabre mastery when he invites Milo Tindle the lover of his wife Marguerite, to his isolated house late one evening. Wyke convinces Tindle that his modest income as a travel agent--best known for 'Tindle's Tours to Jamaica"--will not keep Marguerite living in the style to which she is accustomed. He persuades Tindle to steal a cache of jewels worth 100.000 pounds hidden in the cellar. Tindle will keep the tiresome Marguerite permanently, and Wyke will collect the insurance. Together they plan the artificial robbery, carefully obeying Wyke's insistence that...