Stephen Keeler Keeler: 44 books

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?

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...

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?