"I was once present when [the legendary Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan] began chatting with a Metro-Dade homicide detective about an old murder case that he had never managed to solve -- the apparently motiveless shooting of a restaurant proprietor and his wife, both along in years, as they were about to enter their house," Calvin Trillin once recalled. "Edna would ask a question and the detective would shake his head, explaining that he had checked out that angle without result. Then, after a pause long enough to make me think that they were about to go on to another case, she would ask another question. Could it have been a mistake in the address? Did homicide check out the people who lived in the equivalent house on the next block?...

"Earlier in the day, I had heard her use the same tone to question a young policewoman who was watching over the front desk at Miami Beach headquarters. 'What do you think the rest of Bo's secret is?' Edna said as she skimmed log notations about policemen being called to a loud party or to the scene of a robbery or to a vandalized garage. 'Is Kimberly going to get an abortion?' At first, I thought the questions were about cases she was reminded of by the log reports. They turned out to be about 'Days of Our Lives,' a soap opera..."

["Edna has covered a few thousand murders by now, and she's seen a couple of most things. She has done stories about a man who was stabbed to death because he stepped on somebody's toes on his way to a seat in a movie theatre and about a two-year-old somebody tried to frame for the murder of a playmate... She has done stories about a woman who committed suicide because she couldn't get her leaky roof fixed and about a newspaper deliveryman who committed suicide because during a petroleum shortage he couldn't get enough gasoline. She has done stories about a man who managed to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the heart twice and about a man who threw a severed head at a police officer twice. She has done a story about two brothers who killed a third brother because he interrupted a checkers game. ('I thought I had the best-raised children in the world,' their mother said.) She has done a story about a father being killed at the surprise birthday party given for him by his thirty children. She has done a story about a man who died because fourteen of the eighty-two double-wrapped condom packages of cocaine he tried to carry into the country inside his stomach began to leak. ('His last meal was worth $30,000 and it killed him.')"]