Word: duff
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Died. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, 65, prolific writer of magazine stories and some 20 mystery novels (Lady Killer, The Innocent Mrs. Duff, The Blank Wall}, known to whodunit fans as one of the earliest (since 1929) and most skillful practitioners of the novel of psychological suspense; after long illness; in The Bronx...
...take the reader of this chilling little volume a while to catch on to the fact that Author Duff is not really writing in praise of hanging. He has, in fact, produced a devastating Swiftian satire against capital punishment...
...When the book first appeared in England in 1928, it started a storm of controversy, and a Royal Commission later recommended that the death penalty be abolished. After barely failing to vote a temporary end to capital punishent in 1948, Parliament may now debate the matter again, and Author Duff has brought his satire up to date with the latest technical information, plus international statistics. Though about half the nations of the U.N. have abandoned capital punishment, Britain, the Commonwealth and the "more enlightened states" of the U.S. "continue to hang...
...Author Duff maintains an insistent pitch of anger that makes the book as uncomfortable as it is meant to be, although the anger at times sounds almost old-fashioned in an age when the gallows take far fewer lives than more modern means of destruction. Author Duff will convince all but the most sadistic reader that the gallows are brutal, and that even the basest criminals are too good for hanging. But all he may accomplish is that reformers will propose some more efficient or humanitarian substitutes for the gallows-such as the neat old guillotine, the quick bullet...
Some American readers may be piqued to find that Author Duff does not think much of U.S. hangmanship. Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the U.S. executioner at the Nürnberg war-crimes trials, was accused of bungling the job. "Wherever I look among accounts of American hangings," writes Duff, "I find something to indicate a certain lack of dispatch. Yet there is one great comfort: America's hanged die as certainly as England...