Nicolas Freeling’s hero, inspector Van der Valk of the Amsterdam recherche, meets up with a woman who might have been blackmailed and gives a short description:
She was a solid, well-constructed woman, not fat at all but all curves, with the very fine-textured, pearly skin that goes so well with dark chestnut hair. Small good teeth, quite rare in Holland, where the women have excellent teeth looking like a well-polished row of marble gravestones.
From 1965, but as Sandra often noticed, Dutch women, especially young Dutch women, do tend to have huge perfect white teeth, though her comparison was more to do with horses than marble gravestones. A very Dutch mouth that.
I love Nicolas Freeling’s mysteries, another writer Sandra turned me on to, as he has a knack for getting Dutch people right: his Holland is one that’s still a ways behind the modern world, though getting there, a Holland gone some time I was born, but one I still recognised if only from period fiction.