Harry Stephen Keeler: 38 books

The poor souls who spent the first two books of the Big River Trilogy stranded on a small island waiting for the dam upriver to break are still there, but this time there are more than four. And you can bet that each man has a convincing story why he’s not Actor Hart, the ruthless killer. There...

At the time of its publication, 1932, this was the longest mystery ever written. Would you believe, 313,000 words -- many of them in a strange Hispano-German dialect. It's a simple story about world war in 1942 between an alliance between Germany, Japan, and Mexico against the US and the rest of the...

In the open market in Chicago, a tiger snake could have been bought by a circus for $10. But the particular snake for which Jake Jennings was willing to pay a small fortune was the key to a great mystery. The grand climax is an absolute surprise, and no reader will be able to say, "I knew it from the...

Originally written in 1921 (but not published until 1927), this newspaper thriller pits a young Chicago reporter against the fiend known as the Blond Beast of Bremen.

It's tough being a damn'd Yankee reporter in Southern City, but life just gets worse when the nude bodies of two women -- one white, one black -- are found dead in Cattail Swamp with their heads cut off and swapped. Of course the only way to identify them is to have the bodies on display so every...

"The Babe from Hell!" gasped Andre Marceau just as the wire rightened around his neck. A second later he lay sprawled on the ground -- dead. Close by his body were the tracks of tiny footsteps, beginning nowhere and leading nowhere...the only clues to one of the most shocking crimes of the...

A man stood on a street­corner with a crimson hatbox in his hand. An archbishop approached him and asked what was in the box. "Wah Lee's skull. I cracked Vann's pete," is the enigmatic reply. From this simple encounter stems the trial of the century. The crimson box does indeed hold the skull...

Several men find themselves stranded by a flooding river on Bleeker’s Island. The jewels known as Cleopatra’s Tears are missing, and one of the men is believed to be Actor Hart, notorious killer and thief -- maybe even the one who stole the jewels. Can the sheriff figure out which one is Hart -- and make sure he’s the one without a life jacket when the dam upriver gives way?

A man standing in a darkened room notices that someone is breaking in via the window. He waits until the intruder is inside then holds him at gunpoint. The two then embark on the most audacious conversation any author has ever had the nerve to write. By the end of the book you'll be exhausted by the...

Farrel Ivins may be standing on the gallows with his neck in a noose, but he's not worried. He's taken a drug that makes it impossible to contemplate his future, and besides, he hasn't given his "final" speech yet. He knows that when the governor hears about the odd goings-on in Oxford Circus,...