Word: murderer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Written late in Shaw's career, Heartbreak House unfolds against the backdrop of World War I. It opens almost like an Agatha Christie murder mystery: a young girl, accompanied her fiance and father, comes to a strange country house, invited by a woman she doesn't know all that well. The house is bulging with a variety of guests, to who terms like "wacky" and "zany" cannot be too strongly applied. A burglar enters the premises, as does the long-lost daughter of one of the guests. Relationships among the characters are tangled--nobody is quite what he appears...
...VEHICLE IN The Chain of Chance is a variation upon the conventional detective novel--one might call it a murder without a murderer--which he infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
Evans first made his death wish known at an unusual televised trial. Accused of murder and robbery, Evans and Ritter both threatened to murder the jurors, too, if they acquitted the pair. A shocked jury took all of 15 minutes to convict. Ritter lost his urge to die during the two years he has spent sitting on death row, and is still appealing his case. But Evans asked only that he be put to death by a lethal injection, so he could donate his organs to medicine (burning them by electrocution, he has said, would be a "waste...
...been applied "wantonly" and "freakishly"-most often against poor blacks. But four years later, the court approved new capital punishment laws designed by individual states to be less arbitrary. Typically, the laws allow juries to hand down a death sentence only after weighing "aggravating circumstances," such as the murder of a police officer or the torture of a victim, and "mitigating circumstances," such as a killer's age or emotional state. Now 35 states have the death penalty, and death row, emptied by Furman in 1972, has a population of about...
...official of the new provisional government said Amin would be tried for murder and treason if caught. The ousted leader's former government radio said he "deserves the gallows...