tawdry

When the New Deal put a cop on the Wall Street beat, Dillon cleaned up his act and lived long enough to outlast the memory of his tawdry methods.

The book was filled with tawdry details, such as an anecdote about how Andrew licked the arches of her feet and shared a bath with her.

Yet “Venetian Vespers,” for all its moodiness, is elegantly compressed—the central drama occupies only a few days—and the conspiracy at its core is convincingly tawdry.

Against this enclave’s polished stone walls and bannisters, Lee looks every ragged inch of the tawdry menace the politicians and businessmen he squares off against expect him to be.

He called that meeting "the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy".