Harry: 2719 books

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...

Young Y. Cheung is in a pickle! In order to receive a $100,000 inheritance from his grand­father’s estate, he must get his name mentioned in 1000 U.S. newspapers, “in an honorable fashion” before midnight of the day before the estate is settled. On top of that, his family doesn’t consider...

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?

The century that began in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War was catastrophic. Over the course of that one-hundred-year span, civilizations were destroyed in the Old World, the New World, and the Third World, the latter represented by China, India, and Islam.In Europe the main agent of...

“OK. Get dressed”…my clothes were pieces of decaying rags. I stood there in the nude looking at myself in the mirror hanging on the door. Sheila had put it there a few months before she died. I searched the apartment and managed to find a pair of jeans and a hoodie that had been wrapped up in...

In a supplement to his The American Language, H.L. Mencken encapsulated the early history of Kentucky: "What is now Kentucky was the first region beyond the mountains to be settled. Pioneers began to invade it before the Revolution, and by 1782 it had more than 30,000 population. It was originally...

Includes Civil War Map and Illustrations Pack – 224 battle plans, campaign maps and detailed analyses of actions spanning the entire period of hostilities. The brutal occupation of Baltimore in 1861 by the Federal troops under Benjamin “Beast” Butler, would be the final straw for many...