At moments, suspense drops.
After creating suspense by dropping us into Will's world and making us care about him, Cushman ratchets up the entertainment level, allowing Will to fall in with a troupe of itinerant performers, the "prodigies and oddities" of a mountebank named Master Tidball.
This week, when Councilman David Yassky released a television advertisement questioning the honesty of Councilman John C. Liu, his rival in the Democratic primary runoff for city comptroller, a drop of suspense enlivened the sleeping contest.
He spoke directly to the listener, with punchy sentences, occasional exclamations of "Good heavens!" or "Oh, my goodness!" and pauses that squeezed out the last drop of suspense: the radio broadcaster's equivalent of the raised eyebrow or the knowing grin".
This convention was originally started due to creator Seth MacFarlane being a fan of 1930s and 1940s radio programs, particularly the radio thriller anthology Suspense; however, this convention was dropped after individual episodes became hard to identify and the novelty wore off.
Another of Claude Chabrol's suspense thrillers of French bourgeois life drops off the production line.
The US attorney's office kept the accused in suspense for six months before finally dropping the charges.
In an Apple-esque attempt to use suspense as a marketing tool, Microsoft dropped hints about a mysterious project called Origami and doled out weekly videos with cryptic captions ("...do you know me?... and how i can change your life?").
In a suspense story, there may be a bungled weapons drop in the first chapter, which alerts the White House of a possible assassination threat.
Curzon's steady hand manages to pull off this graceful juggling act of farce, suspense, deft police work and social satire without dropping the traditional British mystery on its head.
