He is a spider of a writer: subtle and sly, patient, with invisible designs.
As a reader, however, Sachs is subtle and sly: he has a way of saying the word "boss" just as the troubled cop Harry probably would, inflected dozens of ways to get across his attitude toward the particular superior he is speaking with, whether grudgingly respectful, nearly affectionate or oozing scorn.
Later that year came "Like Red on a Rose," which was produced by Alison Krauss; that CD was conceived as a bluegrass album, but somewhere along the line it morphed into a subtle and sly collection of grown-up love songs.
She commanded the screen not so much for her acting, which at best was passably droll and arch, but rather for the perfect beauty of her face, with its colliding sensuality and innocence, and for the subtle irony and sly intelligence that animated her work with screen partners like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and Charles Boyer.
There are plenty of subtle scatological riffs and sly references to the banality of middle-American life, for instance.
While neither film could be said to be the finest example of Mexican new wave, both ably demonstrate the subtle tonal shifts and sly story-telling of a cinema in full and confident flow.
Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures.
Although the novel revealed Mosby's rich feeling for language, wide intellectual interests and sly, subtle sense of humor, "Private Altars" remained mired in a self-defeating romanticism.
And their subtle, sly treatment struck a chord with the 40 or so diners, who applauded faithfully between bites of pan-seared tuna and penne Bolognese.
So are "crafty," "cunning," "clever" and "sly".
With its sharp eye, light tone and sly, witty pace, Joanna Trollope's ninth novel delivers all the ingredients of romantic comedy, yet ends with a subtle, dark twist.
