Harry Stephen Keeler: 38 books

Lousy Lou Ousley, the detective, has been given another impossible case: the murder or suicide of a crackpot novelist in a locked room. Everything points to suicide but there’s the sticky point of the gun being made of wax. And what’s with the bottle on the desk with a deuce of diamonds inside...

“The Thirteen Kings of Crooked Chicago Finance!” That’s what the terrorist calling himself THE STAR OF THE NIGHT called the thirteen richest moguls of Chicago when he sent them threatening letters which included decks of cards missing certain kings. Now it’s up to technical draftsman Jason...

From 1935 comes this thrilling novel about five odd people who happen to buy tiny jade figurines of a non-smiling Buddha. Only Harry Stephen Keeler could have come up with this plot!

The worst flood in decades has isolated an island in the middle of Big River and there’s no telling when the dam upriver is going to give. On the island are four men and three lifejackets. The sheriff’s got the rifle and knows one of the other three men is a brutal and ruthless killer. Each man...

John Jones's Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler.

If only Japan could lay her hands on the Thirteenth Coin of Confuscius, which was floating around somewhere in the United States, she could thwart a certain Chinese ambition. The Japanese Secret Service in New York had a clue and immediately a Japanese Secret Service Agent boarded the Chicago Flyer...

After a thousand pages and more sidetrips through the backwoods of Chicago than you can imagine, the story of the man standing on the corner with the crimson hatbox is completed. Finally we find out why the defendant, when asked by the archbishop what was in the box, replied "Wah Lee's skull. I cracked...

What kind of book would be printed on orange leaves? It could only be the one book that contains all of the wisdom of the ancient Chinese, as told in hundreds of aphorisms —The Way Out. Featured in a half dozen webwork mysteries by Harry Stephen Keeler, The Way Out is the only thing keeping one-handed...

“Beans to YOU, sonnyboy, as per my will!” So read the wishes of rich old Balhatchet Barkstone, uncle of young Boyce. Why would he deny Boyce his proper inheritance by leaving him a paltry 16 beans instead of millions of dollars? Could it have been a big mistake? Or an imagined insult? Only...

Margaret Annister is slated to die in Nevada City’s gas chamber but she’s not too worried. She’s been given a drug by the police matron that takes away all cares and concerns. Also, she knows that her good friend Yerxa Indergaard is due to appeal directly to the Governor in her behalf. Throw...

The condemned man asked for three things before he climbed the thirteen steps to the gallows: a glass eye, a champagne cork and a wooden parrakeet. Can any mystery writer—other than Chicago paper blackener Harry Stephen Keeler—have proposed such a scenario? And then written a huge meganovel filled with celestials and tong lore to explain why the condemned man should make such a request?

How the Trigger-Finger of a Man Long Dead Sent Another Man To His Death In this gigantic mystery story, Mr. Keeler has employed atavism in his plot, a thing that has probably never before been attempted in mystery fiction. Starting in pirate days with the bitter enmity between Captain Kidd...

Three men in Sing Sing - all writers - awaiting execution for the same crime. The body of the victim held only two bullets - one of the men is innocent. How can they find out before morning which one of them is to sign the pardon blank? Sing Sing Nights is a startling example of Mr. Keeler's uncanny...

Joseph Fairweather languishes in a mental institution because he has a theory about time and space that’s just plain crazy. Across the ocean in an abandoned warehouse by the River Thames, Eadgyth Whit­church lies bound hand and foot, soon to be thrown into the river by the London branch of the...