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Shadow in the Dark (Death in Australia)

Short Story (1,840 words)

The second of a series called “The dramatic deaths of Dr. Kang”, all published first in the Evening Standard and its sister papers, then in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Dr Kang is the quintessential 'wily oriental', and in each story he is engaged in some illegal activity, becomes the object of violence, but escapes by a combination of sharp observation and good fortune, while somebody else dies in his place.

Ten years on from the setting of his first story, Dr Kang is down on his luck in Willistown on the Australian coast. Mistaken for a medical doctor, he is called out to a lugger to look at a sick sailor. Telling them that the disease is typhus, he injects the captain and other crew with a sleeping drug, telling them it is a vaccine. He then robs the captain's safe of pearls and drugs. Will he get away with it?

 

Evening Standard, Tuesday 21st February 1956. Page 17.
Reprinted in the Glasgow Evening Citizen on 28th February 1956, and as "Death in Australia", Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1957.