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Jan 17, 2017
So nice to read a book by a excellent writer. Here's an example: . . . "[Miss Martha Collins] gave the appearance of having gradually shrunk in her clothes without having noticed it. . . . Throughout the interview she didn't once smile. Admittedly there was nothing in the situation to arouse amusement but she seemed incapable of raising even the briefest smile of formal recognition. But despite these inauspicious beginnings the interview hadn't gone badly. Dalgliesh wondered whether her acidulated tone and perversely unattractive appearance were part of a calculated persona. Perhaps some forty years earlier she had decided to become a hospital character, the beloved tyrant of fiction, treating everyone from the matron to the junior maid with equal irreverence, and had found the characterization so successful and satisfying that she had never managed to drop it. . . . "