He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.

Richard S. Prather
About This Quote

The sentence in the quote "He was dead, all right. He had been shot...," is a sentence from the novel "The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett. In this quote, Sam Spade explains that when a person is found dead, they have been murdered. In the previous scenes, he has described how people have been shot, stabbed and strangled.

This means that it is unlikely for this person to have committed suicide.  The last scene of the quote "Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of," implies that murder was not committed in this case either.

Source: Take A Murder, Darling

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More Quotes By Richard S. Prather
  1. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of.
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