7/19/1944 William Marshall is born

July 19, 1944.  William L. Marshall was born this day in Australia.  He wrote an amazing series of police procedurals set in Hong Bay, an imaginary neighborhood in Hong Kong.  The cops of the Yellowthread Street station had to deal with some of the craziest cases imaginable. 

One example: a wooden raft floats into the harbor.  Lying on it is a skeleton, dead at least twenty years, and some fruit which, the narrator solemnly reports, the skeleton had apparently purchased that morning for breakfast.  Of course, there is a rational explanation, there always is, but before we get to it there will be a whole lot of crazy.