Word: snooping
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crazed blonde and her duffle bag, and who just happens to have made a fortune in the perfume industry, dropped out of civilization, and live on a tiny deserted island. Add a wealthy New York wife who keeps track of her husband via a Miss Mark--a photo-snapping snoop in tourist a clothing. Mix in the usual Venezuelan traffic jams and customs officials. Spice it up with a few out-of-the-ordinary difficulties--such as transporting a red gas stove across an ocean on a tiny boat--and the recipe sounds complete. But not quite...
Weston's search, which took only three hours, illustrates the variety of information about a typical American that is readily available to any snoop. "And I am only an amateur," says Weston. If she had been a professional investigator she could have tapped the files of banks, credit bureaus, insurance companies and Government agencies even more extensively-and sometimes illegally -to learn details about the Doderer family's investments, debts, shopping patterns, charities, hobbies, social life medical history, drinking habits and morals...
...early books, like The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple was a snoop as well as a sleuth, "the worst old cat in the village." Her famous garden was a smokescreen, and her fondness for observing birds through powerful glasses could be turned to other purposes. As time passed, Dr. Haydock had to tell Miss Marple gently that gardening was making her rheumatism worse. She became quieter and less flighty. But her methods of detection were always the same. Where Poirot used his "little gray cells," Jane Marple extrapolated from her knowledge of St. Mary Mead. A swindler? She remembers...
Nowhere do secrets have a higher mortality rate than in Washington, D.C. The capital swarms with leaking bureaucrats and a prying press corps. Incurable gossips are wall to wall. Yet one mystery has proved as snoop-resistant as it is tantalizing: the identity of "Deep Throat," the shadowy underground-garage habitué who is currently providing the same suspense in the film version of All the President's Men that he brought to the bestselling Watergate book by the Washington Post's reporting...
...unfamiliar to all but cultists. Even the worst of them, though, retain a kind of campy charm. For if the paraphernalia of detection have not changed much over the past 100 years, the women clearly have. In The Stir Outside the Café Royal (1898), demure Miss Van Snoop captures a notorious murderer and then weeps for 30 minutes. Observes the author: "She had earned the luxury of hysterics." Not so Jerry Wheeler, an ex-stripper who, in Angel Face (1937), is all hobnails, barbed wire and mean mouth. About one criminal, she says in her characteristic tone...