Harry
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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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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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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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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 world. 3D TV figures prominently, as well as a cactus that proves to be the world's most perfect food source. A remarkable novel, far ahead of its time!...
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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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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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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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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 of a long-dead Chinaman (or is it?), and the man did break into D.A. Vann's safe (or did he?) One thing is certain: a man died when the safe was cracked, and...
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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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The trial of the man apprehended with a crimson hatbox containing a skull continues with the shenanigans of the Moffit brothers, Silas and Saul, trying to thwart the efforts of Elsa Colby, the young defense lawyer who must win her first case - or it will be her last!
Elsa finds herself visiting the darkest parts of Chicago in her quest to prove that when her client told the archbishop that the box contained "Wah Lee's skull," he didn't know the box...
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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 it? In this novel, written in 1958 but never published anywhere until now, Harry Stephen Keeler pulls out all the stops and creates a tale that Arthur Conan...
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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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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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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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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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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!
19) Find the Clock
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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.
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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...