Word: gruff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Raymond Chandler influenced the American detective novel so strongly that even his imitators have imitators. Among the best of the second-generation models is Robert B. Parker, 57, whose private investigator, Spenser, shares Philip Marlowe's gruff chivalry and, like Chandler's "Galahad of the gutter," bears the surname of an Elizabethan literary figure...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
...JOHN: IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD (Warner Bros.). When jazz meets up with rhythm and blues, it's usually less a shoot-out than a sellout: one or the other gets sold short. Dr. John, a surgical master at the piano and a good, gruff vocalizer, is one physician with a solid prescription to do each style right -- and proud...
...JOHN: IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD (Warner Bros.). When jazz meets up with rhythm and blues, it's usually less a shoot-out than a sellout: one or the other gets sold short. Dr. John, a surgical master at the piano and a good, gruff vocalizer, is one physician with a solid prescription to do both styles right -- and proud...
...many hidden elements in his life." In the beginning Henry speaks to his long-lost son slowly, with wide eyes and grand gestures, as if Indy were a child in need of gentle remedial education. "I was bound to have fun with the role of a gruff, Victorian Scottish father," Connery says of Henry (remember, the Jones family hails from Utah). "And have fun I did -- so much so that I told Harrison, 'If you give me all the jokes, you'll really have to work for your scenes...