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When Kwan Yung, Chinese inventor, gets cheated out of $32,000, it sets off a whirlwind set of circumstances that will affect financier Christopher Thorne, his beautiful daughter, Alicia, and his loyal employee, Philip Erskine - for better or for worse! Throw in a brain-teaser and you've got the makings for one of the most complex webwork mysteries to escape the mind of Harry Stephen Keeler. You also get a third solution to the Marceau Case, which...
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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?
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In 1936 Harry Stephen Keeler wrote a huge novel featuring the most unreliable narrator in literary history. His publishers forced him to split the books into two volumes, The Mysterious Mr. I and The Chameleon.
Now, Ramble House has put the two novels together in one volume so you can read the whole story without changing books. Together, they are one of the most unusual books ever written.
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Description
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 Tong of the Lean Grey Rats That Swarm the World, just because she overheard a phone conversation she shouldn't have. Meanwhile, back in the States there's a...
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"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 Harry Stephen Keeler could have concocted such a plot.
A note to the sensitive: As with many novels written in the first half of the 20th century, this book contains...
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It all began with a mysterious black satchel stitched closed with silver wire. Mrs. Matilda Hunter, Jerry Evans' landlady, finds the satchel and leaves it in his room - and then is heinously murdered. Before long, Jerry finds out about the contents of the satchel - a device known as the Michaux Death Ray - and he's off on an odyssey!
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Description
What would you do if you were Angus MacWhorter, owner of the Biggest Little Circus on Earth, and you'd been offered $3000 for just ten minutes alone with the two-headed child who at one time was the star feature of the circus? Why, you'd send your right hand man, Brock Colburn, to Chicago to check up on the offering party. The trouble is, Brock is wanted in Chitown for an old felony he didn't commit, and any sleuthing he does is going to have to be...
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Description
In December of 1946 Harry Stephen Keeler wrote a huge novel he called THE ACE OF SPADES MURDER. No publisher would tackle a novel so big so he split it up, eventually making five new novels from it. THE CASE OF THE JEWELED RAGPICKER was the one first published, in 1948 by Phoenix Press. In it, circus driver Bill Chattuck must make his way across Idiots' Valley via Old Twistibus in time to prevent something horrible from happening. You know the story...
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Description
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 person in Southern City can see them. With such an organized ritual, how can ace reporter Tommy Skirmont ever hope to solve the mystery and keep his job?
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Description
One of Keeler's best, this is the second half of the notorious Marceau case, where a strangler baby dangling from an autogyro may have done the deed. Written in 1935 at the peak of Keeler's powers.
Xenius Jones, Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, gave the exact date he would reveal the details of the infamous André Marceau murder. Then Alec Snide, an American reporter, broke the case before he did! But Jones insists that Snide is 100% wrong-and he's...
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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 Vann's pete." But not without some of the most incredible courtroom hijinks in the history of jurisprudence. And it's told as only Harry Stephen Keeler...
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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 tales each man tells, each more unbelievable than the last. The climax will leave you gasping!
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Wild, fantastic, yet overwhelmingly logical, this yarn could come only from Chicago's own Sherlock Holmes and that favorite of American mystery fans, Harry Stephen Keeler. Here he gives us a brand-new webwork of mysteries - a cracksman who uses not dynamite, but a violin; a second-hand safe with amazing secrets inside; a volcanic island in the Pacific; a fantastic kingdom in Europe; and a pair of lovers caught in the very center of this whirlwind...
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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?
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It wasn't fair! Just because Joe "Zicky" Czeszczicki had the misfortune to hire as his lawyer, 'Golden-Tongue' Winfrock, who died right before the trial, Joe was slated to die in 48 hours! There's no way a man accused of murdering a State's Attorney could beat those kinds of odds. But Joe didn't know about Crystal Armswayne of London and how she would figure into his life -- and he knew even less about Tuddleton T. Trotter, ingenious author of Mathematics...
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Description
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 has his own story and if you don't think this is a situation ripe for the webwork machinations of Harry Stephen Keeler, you haven't been reading one of the...
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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 in local attorney Croxson Kalver who knows she's been set up and you have the makings of a webwork mystery only Harry Stephen Keeler could have penned.
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Description
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 are not enough life jackets to go around and the Sheriff must figure out which is the criminal so that Hart is the one left to die when the waters begin to...
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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 web work mysteries by Harry Stephen Keeler, The Way Out is the only thing keeping one-handed Stefan Czeszcziczki's wife alive as she awaits an operation. How "Zicky" uses its wisdom to save her life is a tale only America's most forgotten author...
20) The Trap
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Description
Sheriff Lafe Whitecotton has a problem: sleepwalking Whisperwell Jenkins has stolen and burned some important evidence -- as well as $500 in cold cash! -- from his office and now everyone blames him for just about everything. Throw in a mysterious letter that claims that a book called THE CHINESE CHARACTER holds the clue to a murder and a doddering old detective named Tuddleton Trotter and you have the makings of one of the goldangdest Keeler novels...
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