Harry Stephen Keeler

The Skull of the Waltzing Clown

Fender Tucker

Gavin O'Keefe

Ramble House

A Harry Stephen Keeler Companion

to Izzard

A collection of just about all of the existing short stories written by Harry Stephen Keeler back in the early 20th century. Edited by Fred Cleaver, the 22 short stories are followed by a complete bibliography of Keeler's short fiction.

The Short Stories of Harry Stephen Keeler

Strands of the Web

A Mystery Novel

Behind that Mask

Hazel Goodwin Keeler

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?

The Street of One Thousand Eyes (Hong Lei Chung #2)

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!

The Skull in the Box, Book 3

The Man with the Wooden Spectacles

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!

The Skull in the Box

The Man with the Magic Eardrums

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 Riddle of the Wooden Parrakeet

"My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him." -- Neil Gaiman 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!

The Matilda Hunter Murder

"My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him." -- Neil Gaiman Who are those six mysterious figures that are looming outside the owner's trailer of Angus MacWhorter's Mammoth Motorized Shows? And why would they want the copy of a pulp magazine that he bought for ten cents? The answers have something to do with a gangster, the tong of the Lean Grey Rats, and a group calling itself the Society of Retired Clergymen.

The Screwball Circus Mysteries

The Six from Nowhere

El Abanico de Pavo Real

I Killed Lincoln At 10

The Straw Hat Murders

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 now somebody has to pay. And it just may be the man's lawyer, Elsa Moffit, attorney-at-law with no cases under her belt -- yet!

The Man with the Crimson Box

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.

Find the Clock

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 beginning." Here is fiction that is stranger than truth. It contains one of the most perplexing and labyrinthine mysteries ever conceived by the human mind.

Also published as "The Tiger Snake"

The Riddle of the Yellow Zuri

It’s 1855, and with a war over slavery looming on the horizon, all bachelor Clark Shellcross wants to do is get married. But when his hopes are dashed he succumbs to temptation and takes a weird drug that claims it will change his life. And it does! He wakes up the next morning with black skin! It doesn’t take long for him to realize that 1855 is not a good time to have darkly hued skin, even in the northern city of Boston. The story of his frantic odyssey in search of his former life could only have sprung from the anarchic imagination of Harry Stephen Keeler. NOTE: This book is not politically correct by current standards. It contains language and ideas relevant to the age in which it is set (1855) and was written in the 1930s, a less progressive time. It is dated, but remains a fascinating artifact of its era. Although it deals with race, it is decided anti-racism (which may be why it remained unpublished until discovered among Harry Stephen Keeler’s papers). A note to the sensitive: the language is of its time period and it is not policitally correct by contemporary standards.

A Comedy of Race Relations

The Man Who Changed His Skin

A dash from an empty house at the sight of a murdered man with a dragon-topped hatpin protruding from one eye! An escape from the police on the back of a speeding roadster. The discovery that its driver, a curly-haired, beautiful girl, clutches in one hand the headless body of that same fatal dragon-topped hatpin! This is the first climax of breathless action that winds about the figure of Ford Harling, penniless derelict in Chicago, and plunges him into the heart of another famous web-work plot of Harry Stephen Keeler. He is caught in a maelstrom of circumstances that whirl about a stolen ruby, counterfeit bills, a nocturnal visit to a cemetery, and a peculiarly baffling murder involving a lovely heiress. It is the fastest-moving mystery ever written by Harry Stephen Keeler, expert in bafflement and tantalizing clues.

The Washington Square Enigma

"My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him." -- Neil Gaiman There's nothing new under the sun in Idiots' Valley, home of Harry Stephen Keeler's Screwball Circus. Angus MacWhorter's circus has made it across Old Twistibus -- the windingest road in the world -- but there's still an important wagon that Rance Holly has to drive to catch up with the rest of the circus in Foleysburg, or the circus will be lost to rival entrepreneur, Wolf Gladish. There's no nuttier place in the country than Idiots' Valley, with its pack of illiterate bumpkins, and Harry and Hazel milk it for all it's worth in this first English-language edition of a Keeler classic!

Harry Stephen Keeler

About

Books

Join the club