Word: keyed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Houdini knew that most of the handcuffs then manufactured could be opened with the same key, and he kept one hidden on his person. Others could be opened by rapping them on a hard surface; so when he challenged an audience to put him in cuffs, there was always a convenient piece of metal strapped to his thigh. When he conned Scotland Yard detectives into trying their "darbies" (handcuffs), they locked Houdini's arms around a stone pillar and left him to suffer. The great escapist simply banged the darbies on the pillar and walked...
Feeling more and more like an automaton himself, the patient goes down the line. In one cubicle, a technician takes a blood sample, feeds it into a machine that spins out and counts the cells, measures the concentration of certain key chemicals. In another, the patient gives a urine specimen. Again, a machine reduces it to neat chemical symbols and figures...
...gets a top fee of $3,000 per week. Appearing last week at Indiana's French Lick Jazz Festival, he was at the top of his inventive form. A master of the dramatic effects of silence, he sometimes sits for as much as 16 bars without touching a key ("A pattern," he points out, "can be completed in space"). He rarely repeats himself in a chorus, may go in one brief number-Autumn in New York or The Girl Next Door-through a kaleidoscopic range of moods, most of them merely suggested. by a rhythmic break, a lightly lyric...
Such activity did its part to brighten the unemployment picture. The Labor Department removed 14 more major industrial centers from its list of areas of heavy unemployment, reported employment gains in nearly all of the 149 key centers that it surveys. The change brings the number of areas with "substantial" joblessness down to 46, compared with 89 at the worst of the recession...
...such old hands at making their characters and backgrounds believable that the reader is persuaded to accept the whole bag of outrageous melodrama: hanky-panky with a million-dollar will, baffling telephone calls in the middle of the night, mysterious footprints on the terrace, the fatal mugging of a key suspect, pursuit by a killer through a raging summer storm. Deserving of Favorite Sleuth status: Detective Nathan Shapiro of Homicide. Manhattan West, a shambling, sad-eyed man who suspects that he is not really up to his job and ought to be pounding a beat in Brooklyn. Shapiro asks what...