Tricksy

My trickſey Spirit.

There will succeed, therefore, in my opinion, and that too within no long time, to the rudeness and rusticity of our age, that ensnaring meretricious popularness in literature, with all the tricksy humilities of the ambitious candidates for the favourable suffrages of the judicious public, which if we do not take good care will break up and scatter before it all robustness and manly vigour of intellect, all masculine fortitude of virtue.

A green light was flickering in his bulging eyes. ‘Masster, masster!’ he hissed. ‘Wicked! Tricksy! False!’ He spat and stretched out his long arms with white snapping fingers.

As an experienced editor I disapprove of backflashes, foreshadowings and tricksy devices […]

The second section of the novel consists of “The Golden Vanity”, the New Yorker short story that prompted the narrator’s substantial advance, and which transposes names and details of the story and characters introduced in part one. This may seem tricksy in a way we’ve seen many times before.

“I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to smoke me out, you tricksy little bitches. Well, eat skata. Because I actually quite like this new company.”

And that is exactly what he did: marrying tricksy European post-modernism with hard-boiled American noir, to create something dizzyingly inventive and new.