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 could tell it — in four long books.

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 slab of ancient stone that seems to disappear and reappear according to some laws of nature we know nothing about. What's going on here?

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 his one-of-a-kind profession, business detective, "honorable". How Y. Cheung uses his inscrutable wiles to gain happiness and the inheritance is a tale only Harry Stephen Keeler could spin."It was definitely loopy and is the second of his novels I have read to deal sympathetically and sensibly with Asians in 1930s while everyone else was demonizing or eroticizing them in genre fiction of that era. This is one of Keeler's forays into the 'locked room' and impossible problem genre, but being Keller it involves an outrageous and nearly unfathomable solution." — G. F. Norris, Golden Age Detection.

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, Lake City, Chicago, and Chinatown Crescent, where the tong of the Lean Grey Rats rules, Farrel is bound to be saved. So begins the most Oriental of Harry Stephen Keeler's webwork mysteries.

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 actually had a skull inside.This classic mystery tale by webwork master Harry Stephen Keeler is every bit as confusing as it sounds — until Keeler pulls it all together!

Quiribus Brown, probably the only 7-and-a-half-foot-tall mathematical detective in the Midwest, has got to solve the mystery of who killed Professor Munstergale, or he'll never get his rightful inheritance. Luckily, Munstergale lived long enough to draw on a blackboard two diagrams, one pointing to his killer, and the other pointing to where he knew the killer from. There are two theories, both involving prominent citizens as suspects, and Inspector Clarvoe's job is depending on Quiribus' deciding which theory—or neither—is correct.

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!

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 Doyle might have written.

"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 Twentieth Century!That was the beginning of a mystery that Scotland Yark sleuths worked on frantically for two years and then abandoned in despair, without a solution. Yet it was to be solved, not by a detective, but by a resourceful and imaginative American newspaper man, who tracked down an overlooked clue and reopened the case. The thread of Destiny which brought a horrible death to Andre Marceau stretched through Europe to Japan and Australia and even America!

AN INDIE NEXT PICKA LIBRARYREADS PICK“A dark and heady dream of a book” (Alix E. Harrow) about a ruined mansion by the sea, the djinn that haunts it, and a curious girl who unearths the tragedy that happened there a hundred years previousAkbar Manzil was once a grand estate off the coast of South Africa. Nearly a century later, it stands in ruins: an isolated boardinghouse for eclectic misfits, seeking solely to disappear into the mansion’s dark corridors. Except for Sana. Unlike the others, she is curious and questioning and finds herself irresistibly drawn to the history of the mansion: To the eerie and forgotten East Wing, home to a clutter of broken and abandoned objects—and to the door at its end, locked for decades.Behind the door is a bedroom frozen in time and a worn diary that whispers of a dark past: the long-forgotten story of a young woman named Meena, who died there tragically a hundred years ago. Watching Sana from the...

Pennies from Jude asks, "Who's voice are you listening to?' Finding a penny means someone in Heaven is thinking of you, or that's how the old saying goes... For Jen Carroll the pennies begin showing up after she has a nightmare about her childhood friend, Jude. While investigating the mysterious link between Jude and the copper pennies, Jen struggles with reconciling her strict Catholic beliefs and the realization that she is gay. Jen begins asking questions: Who was this God of hers that punishes those who suffer so greatly and what does it all have to do with her misty childhood memories of Jude? She struggles to come to terms with her sexuality and religious beliefs. Why does it all seem so eerily familiar? Jude's warning of "They're gonna do it to you too!" rings in her ears as she searches for answers. In an age where being gay is increasingly accepted by society, many young LGBTQ people, like Jen, still carry around shame and guilt for...

Hired gunfighter Cole Jardine has decided to call time on his dangerous profession when he receives a mysterious job offer from the Colorado town of Red Mesa. All set to ignore it, his partner Waco Santee suddenly arrives back at their cabin in Wyoming to announce that the army are hot on their heels. With minutes to spare, flight across the border is their only option. The pair succeed in evading pursuit and then head their separate ways. But nothing is ever that simple. A bushwhacker attempts to remove Cole but fails. Arriving in Red Mesa, he is then challenged to a shoot-out by rancher Ed Clifford who claims the gunslinger has been hired by an unscrupulous crook who wants to steal his land. Which faction will the hired gun support? And how will he react when his old partner turns up backing the opposing side in the dispute?