The headless, handless torso of a murdered man is discovered in a small town one hot July day, and outside of the fact that he wasn’t a local, the police have nothing to go on. Fortunately, Griswold is vacationing in the area and can give the man’s name in a matter of minutes.

This is one of the better Union Club mysteries. The only real gap in Griswold’s reasoning has to do with “the list“ the murdered man mentioned to a bartender. (His name is the triply unique name on that list, hence the story’s title.) Griswold deduces that, because the murder occured on July 4th, the local paper had patriotically reprinted the Declaration of Independence and included a list of its signers. Now, granted, I’m not from a small town, but did newspapers reprint copies of the Declaration of Independence every July 4th as late as the 1980’s? I’ve certainly never known one to do so. Once you have that link in the logic in place, however, the solution is quite reasonable.

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