Word: clew
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Lady Alice, should she ever thumb through Burke's Peerage, would find that her family makes vivid reading. Its motto is Amo ("I love"). Sir Walter, First Lord Scott of Buccleuch (pronounced Buck-clew), "carried on a predatory warfare against the English" and "was delivered up as a hostage upon an adjustment of feuds between the English and Scots...
Famed for his skill at the start of a race, Skipper Vanderbilt got Rainbow across within five seconds of the gun. Endeavour was a full minute behind. She had first hoisted a double-clew jib, then changed to a Genoa just before the start. On the 15-mile beat that started the 30-mile windward and leeward course, Rainbow tacked first, crossed Endeavour's bow, held her advantage in a tacking duel as they neared the turning buoy, rounded it almost three minutes ahead. Coming back before the wind, both boats broke out parachute spinnakers, took them in when...
...before a hedge, groans, contorts his face, sinks lifeless to the pavement Europe's most accomplished cracksman, dinner jacketed, cool, emerges from a casement window, catches sight of the officer still weltering bloodily on the hedge, hurries away, slightly ruffied by the event. Scotland Yard at last has a clew; if they find the cracksman who stole the $256,000 dollar diamond, they feel certain they will have the maniac swordsman who stuck the policeman from behind the hedge, who had killed four other police in almost as many nights, who had kept the newspapers in an orgy of headlines...
Finding no visible marks on her body, mystified Commissioner Colt orders an autopsy. Next day he calls all the suspects to his house, announces that they all have criminal records, bids them good day. Only clew to the murder is a small bamboo tube which is missing after the meeting. Going to the home of Dr. Lengle (William von Brincken) Commissioner Colt finds the tube, and Lengle dead. The contents of the tube make audiences gasp. Explanation of the murders causes natural historians to scoff...
...investigator. But it was Detective Burns's exposures of the Department of Interior's Oregon land & lumber frauds during the Rooseveltian muckraking era, and of Boss Abe Ruef's corruption of San Francisco, that brought him to fame. With a handful of sawdust as his only clew he trapped the Brothers McNamara, later convicted for dynamiting the Los Angeles Times' Building. Convicted of complicity in contempt of court for jury-shadowing in the Sinclair-Fall trial in 1927 he was acquitted on appeal. He once said: "Private detectives as a class are the biggest...