devilry

She could write and she wrote a great deal, including detective fiction, a gothic thriller “of devilry, seduction, and hashish” and stories about “ghosts, suicides, and kidnapping.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026

What else could it be — and what new devilry is waiting for us tomorrow?

From Salon ● Oct. 8, 2019

There’s hardly one whole brain to be assembled from the scraps of mentality distributed among the story’s criminal plotters—and Steve, with his laid-back overconfidence in his casually cavalier devilry, proves no sharper than the rest.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 29, 2016

A different, more downbeat brand of devilry is afoot in "The Exorcist," which takes off from William Peter Blatty’s bestselling 1971 novel and director William Friedkin's 1973 film.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 23, 2016

‘There’s some devilry at work in the Shire,’ he said.

From "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien

"Nay, no Mingo will be near the portage, for that is a spot too public for their devilries," answered the Pathfinder confidently.

From Pathfinder; or, the inland sea by James Fenimore Cooper

We moderns, disbelieving in devilries, would require the most elaborately romantic and poetic accessories—a splendid lurid back-ground, a magnificent Byronian invocation of the fiend.

From Belcaro Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions by Vernon Lee

Giuliano, who had been an associate of the Duke and an abettor of Lorenzino's "devilries," fled precipitately from Florence, and sought the protection of the Duke of Milan.

From The Tragedies of the Medici by Edgcumbe Staley

And once every seven years he keeps tryst with Red Cap on the scene of his former devilries.

From Strange Pages from Family Papers by T. F. Thiselton (Thomas Firminger Thiselton) Dyer

We never martyred a saint, and amid all the witch-hunting devilries of Scotland and England we burned only one witch, a namesake of my own.

From The Open Secret of Ireland by T. M. (Thomas Michael) Kettle