Frederick Knott, 86, a playwright whose short but admirable string of credits included two long-running Broadway shows - Dial M for Murder in 1952 and Wait Until Dark in 1966 - died of undisclosed causes Tuesday at his home in New York.
Mr. Knott wrote only three plays, but all were successful.
Dial M for Murder was a thriller about a woman who comes to realize that her husband is plotting her death. It was an immediate hit in London, then ran for 552 performances on Broadway, with Maurice Evans in the lead.
Director Alfred Hitchcock turned it into spine-tingling cinema two years later with a cast led by Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and Robert Cummings.
Wait Until Dark ran for 373 performances on Broadway before moving to the London stage for an even longer engagement. The Broadway production starred Lee Remick as a blind woman pursued by criminals who think she possesses a doll concealing a cache of drugs. Remick's performance earned her a Tony nomination.
In the 1967 movie, directed by Terence Young, Audrey Hepburn plays the blind woman and Alan Arkin is the lead henchman who terrorizes her.
Mr. Knott's third play, Write Me a Murder, also reflected his fascination with homicidal themes. The story of a writer and her lover who plot a murder ran for 25 weeks on Broadway in 1961.
The son of Quaker missionaries, Mr. Knott was born in Hankow, China. Sent to England for his education, he graduated from Cambridge University in 1938, then served in the Royal Artillery during World War II.
After the war, he was struggling to make a living as a screenwriter when he decided to try his hand at writing a play. He gave himself a year to write one, but took 18 months instead and wound up nearly broke. The result was Dial M for Murder, in which the suspense turns not on what the murder plan is and who will execute it but on whether it will succeed.
"I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right," Mr. Knott, who won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for the play, told The Sun in 1995, when a revival of it was opening at the Lyric Opera House.
When Mr. Knott shopped the manuscript around to theatrical managers, he got only rejections. He was ready to lock it away in a drawer when a friend told him the BBC was hungry for new material. The BBC wound up producing the play for television, where it was seen by London producer James P. Sherwood. He had just lost a play, but still had a theater to fill. After three weeks of rehearsal, Dial M for Murder opened in London to rave reviews. It set off a bidding war among American producers, and Hollywood also called.
Mr. Knott hated writing and did it only for the money, his wife, Ann Hillary Knott, told The New York Times. He had plotted out in his mind two other plays - one about an elderly couple confronted by a gang, and the other about a brothel. But he never committed a word of either play to paper, despite many offers of advances over the years.
Desmond Hoyte, 73, an opposition leader and former president of Guyana, died Sunday in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, of an apparent heart attack.
Mr. Hoyte, leader of the People's National Congress party, had a history of heart trouble. He underwent triple-bypass surgery in New York in 1993 after collapsing in Georgetown.
A British-trained lawyer, he was Guyana's president from 1985 to 1992, when his party lost to the governing People's Progressive Party. He had served as ceremonial prime minister, vice president and held ministerial positions, including finance and economic planning minister, before becoming president.