A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there
                                            are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the "Flying
                                            Strangler-Baby," a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby
                                            and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)

                                            Someone killed an antique dealer just so he could steal the face --
                                            only the face -- from a surrealist painting of "The Man from
                                            Saturn." (The Face of the Man from Saturn, 1933)

                                            A woman's body disappears while taking a steam bath. Only her
                                            head and toes, sticking out of the steam cabinet, remain. (The Case
                                            of the Transparent Nude, 1958)

                                            Because of a clause in a will, a character has to wear a pair of
                                            hideous blue glasses constantly for a whole year. This is so that he
                                            will eventually see a secret message that is visible only with the
                                            glasses. (The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, 1929)

                                            A poem leads the protagonist to a cemetery specializing in circus
                                            freaks and the grave of "Legga, the Human Spider," a woman with
                                            four legs and six arms. Legga was born in Canton, China, and died
                                            in Canton, Ohio. (The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, 1934)

                                            A disgruntled phone company employee calls every man in
                                            Minneapolis, telling him the morning papers will name him as the
                                            secret husband of convicted murderess Jemimah Cobb, who runs a
                                            whorehouse specializing in women with physical abnormalities.
                                            (The Man With the Magic Eardrums, 1939)
 
 

    Elsa Colby was so small--at least as compared to the giant quilt cover which, on it's slightly inclined rack, covered almost one wall of her cramped office--and which office, fortunately for it's own size, was never crammed with clients and seldom with even a client!--that at times she had to mount a small stubby stepladder stool to ply her skillful needle. The bright red of Elsa's hair--made even brighter, seemingly, by its contrast with the knitted mouse-grey one-piece dress that she wore--was of the exact color as the great scarlet poppies which lay at each corner of the quilt; her blue eyes were precisely the blue of the pond which lay at it's middle--at least of the one experimentally completed ripple on that pond; and the freckles on her face--and most particularly on her nose--were like--but no, they were not like anything on the quilt proper at all, but were like the spattering of brown ink from an angry fountain-pen on a sheet of white paper.
    Her quilt, it might be said, lay exposed in entirety upon it's huge rack for the simple reason that it held, here and there, throughout its entire area, certain flecks which must be done in green; and Elsa, having been able to pick up a huge amount of green silk thread--but green only!--at a discount, had to do that color first, and fully, just as independent shoestring movie producers, with little or no money to rent locations or put up settings, have to complete, in one rented setting, all the scenes for two or more "quickies,"--before negotiating a new setting!
    <snip...>
    Elsa, this day, had just completed a single leaf of those several million green leaves yet to be done, and had climbed off her stool to survey it from a distance--when her phone rang.
    She did not answer it immediately, however, for her point of surveyal of her quilt happened to be alongside her one broad window and her surveyal thereof had transferred itself instead fascinatedly to the street far below where some kind of local political parade was going by, the band music coming up almost thread-like through the glass pane of the window, the obviously green-coated musicians seeming, from above, like small green rectangles mathematically spaced apart, and all flowing onward in unison--and a real elephant!--Republican, therefore, that parade!--looking from above, like some grey wobbling paramoecium--and scarcely any bigger! From the old-fashioned windows of the 9-story Printography Building across the way, ink-smeared printers' devils were leaning out and gesticulating to each other--and Elsa, who loved elephants passionately--even when shrunken a hundredfold as was this one!--was assuredly just now torn between love and business!

Now, local-colourist, we can eat up-town at an air-cooler place--rather half-way de luxe, too, for a town like this--or we can eat at a joint outside the gates where a hundred sweat-encrusted mill-workers, every one with a peeled garlic bean laid alongside his plate, will inhale soup like the roar of forty Niagras, and crunch victuals like a half-hundred concrete mixers all running at once. Which--for you?

For he was to become now, as I was shortly to find, as coldly calculating as an adding machine
sitting on the North Pole!

    "On'y aftah de gang dey has stringed him along wid fish-sto'y aftah fish-sto'y as to w'y de boy ain' retuhned. An' finally he sees he is gettin' stringed by--by expuhts!--an' so den he tell de po-leece. An' de po-leece, investigatin', fin' ev'dences dat Wah Lee's convuhsation wid his papa, dat day, wuz listen' in on. An dat de gang knew dat way dat Wah Lee wuz goin' into de pahk 'roun' dusk. And so lay fo' him. A' dat wuz de end ob dat chapter. Boy gone! Moneh gone! All ovah! Not one man cotched."

    "Well, wot' the bloomin' idea back o' all this confab, anyw'y? You shoot me--an' you've shot yoursel, your pop-in-law an' your woming all into the p'ypers. For this 'ere w'ite silk badge wot I'm wearin' says as 'ow I'm a delygyte from Lime'ouse to th' British H'Isles an' Colonial Possessings Convenching o' Skyte-an'-Chips an' Jellied Eeels Purveyors, to be 'eld in Vancoover, British Columbiar, three weeks from tomorrer. An' seein' as oo' I am, shootin' me wouldn't be good-like. No! For I've left a few notes in me 'otel drawer--an' me delygyie's pypers--in case o' accident like wot. So wot's keepin' us from gittin' down to business? You s'y you got that twenty tousand dollars? Orl right. P'y it over--like as 'e towld you you was to do."

    So, Jones says, for all practical purposes, in a world of space and "time," the "wrinkles" resulting from the "crime-stress" appear, in reality, as "deviations." Deviations in human conduct: deviations from normal habit, custom, and  be likened to an explosion, or concussion, the force of which radiates out in all directions--not just into the future, he cautions--but also into the past!--definitely deviating the paths and conduct not only of the chief actors--but of all those who have intimate contact with them--and who, by that very relationship, are thus displaced in 4 dimensions from the chief actors. The maximum possible "deviation" in a murder is, Jones points out, that of the murdered man--whose course is deviated, for the first time, from living to being dead!