Insurance is just gambling. Betting an individual will die sometime is a fairly safe wager but providing one maintains a suitable — plausible — distance from him and the circumstance of the event, how is it different from betting on an election or the discovery of the Loch Ness Monster or any of the thousands of strange insurances Lloyds of London underwrote or the weird bets Ladbrokes will gladly lay you ?
‘Oh, but it is–I love melodrama. But doesn’t it strike you as
being–far-fetched? For instance, that man being chained to a log, and
the mother agreeing to her son’s death?’
*
Mr. Reeder rubbed his nose thoughtfully.*
‘The Bermondsey gang chained Harry Salter to a plank, turned it over and
let him down, just opposite Billingsgate Market. I was at the execution
of Tod Rowe, and he admitted it on the scaffold. And it was “Lee”
Pearson’s mother who poisoned him at Teddington to get his insurance
money so that she could marry again. I was at the trial and she took her
sentence laughing–now what else was there in that act? Oh, yes, I
remember: the proprietor of the saw-mill tried to get the young lady to
marry him by threatening to send her father to prison. That has been
done hundreds of times–only in a worse way. There is really nothing very
extravagant about a melodrama except the prices of the seats, and I
usually get my tickets free!’
Edhar Wallace — The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder