Sublime

nisei

In reviewing The Christmas Egg, Boucher expressed the hope that Nightingale would return. What he (like almost everyone else) failed to realise is that, in a very oblique passage in The Spoilt Kill, Kelly had effectively killed off her first series detective in a car crash.

Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.

Protective colouration, she called her outfits. She looked like a dependable mother from a respectable neighbourhood such as ours. As she worked at the kitchen counter, she might have been demonstrating a jiffy recipe in Good Housekeeping magazine—something with tomato aspic, this being the mid-1950s, when tomato aspic was a food group.

A sensitive woman, disappointed in marriage, exhausts her own ingenuity before she takes counsel.

pettishly.

Emma Blake and her offer to accompany the detective, not for his sake, you suspect, but for her own. A desire not to be alone. You sense that she is shaken, unnerved, perhaps, by a premonition of the toll that decades at West Heart, living among these people, could exact on a woman’s spirit.