Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Promptly recognized as the arm of a locally popular barfly named James Smith who had disappeared two weeks before, the undigested arm put Australian sleuths on their mettle. By last week they had reconstructed the "Shark Murder" about as follows: A drug-smuggling gang hired Smith to scuttle a yacht they had insured for $42,500 with Lloyd's. When Scuttler Smith later tried to blackmail the gang with threats of exposing them to Lloyd's, the gang had him dismembered and fed piece by piece to sharks in Sydney Harbor. Smith's tattooed arm was swallowed...
Such smart detective work so impressed Coroner E. T. Oram that he encouraged police to hold an Irishman named Brady on a charge of murder because Smith was last seen when he left his home to go fishing with Brady. "Keep your mouth shut!" lawyers advised, and Pat Brady set his Irish jaw. Last week before the Commonwealth's High Court Brady's counsel cited a basic maxim of Anglo-Saxon law, argued: "There can be no inquest, much less a trial for murder, without a corpus delicti and one tattooed human arm disgorged by a shark...
Accepting this plea, the Court freed Pat, left Australia's great "Shark Murder" stymied. "For all they can prove," declared Pat's friends, "James Smith may still be alive. What if his arm was cut off and thrown to a shark? That doesn't show he's dead...
...nothing more daring than a visit to a London music hall, entertaining in his fiat a girl who tells him that she is a counter-espionage agent protecting England from an international ring which is selling the secrets of the Air Ministry and that she has just committed a murder. Hannay considers this nonsense until the next morning, when he finds his guest dying with a knife in her back. Thus assured of her veracity, he constitutes himself heir to her quest and with the meagre information she has given him sets out to solve the riddle of the Thirty...
...Slight Case of Murder (by Damon Runyon & Howard Lindsay; Howard Lindsay, producer). The world of Damon Runyon is no less unique, apart and unreal than that of Lewis Carroll or P. G. Wodehouse. For one thing, it has a language of its own, in which a prison is a college, a horse is a beetle, an I. O. U. a marker, a child a punk. And in the lawless cosmos of this oldtime Hearst sportswriter, fictionist and cinema scenarist, criminals are regarded as diverting eccentrics; slaughter, a mere irrelevancy and the underworld, a sort of jocular never-never land. With...