Biggers had always been interested in mystery fiction, but his interest in Hawaii clearly stems from a 1919 vacation in Honolulu. While there, he read a newspaper article on a Chinese detective named Chang Apana....
Baldpate Inn has a mystery and seven keys. The novelist has one. The other six fall into the hands of six apparent lunatics: 1. a hermit who flees from barbers and women has a key, 2. a peroxide blonde who "just...
The Chinese Parrot (1926) is the second novel in the Charlie Chan series of mystery novels by Earl Derr Biggers. It is the first in which Chan travels from Hawaii to mainland California, and involves a crime...
Kangaroo is an account of a visit to New South Wales by an English writer named Richard Lovat Somers, and his German wife Harriet, in the early 1920s. This appears to be semi-autobiographical, based on a three-month...
The Charlie Chan series #1 The novel, which takes place in 1920s Hawaiʻi, spends time acquainting the reader with the look and feel of the islands of that era from the standpoint of both white and non-white...
Andrew Lang's Fairy Books — also known as Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's Fairy Books of Many Colors — are a series of twelve collections of fairy tales, published between 1889 and...
A year or so before the beginning of World War I, a young woman named Lisa la Giuffria is seduced by a white magician, Cyril Grey, and persuaded into helping him in a magical battle with a black magician and...
A historical adventure set during the Hundred Years' War. The story follows a young man as he leaves the shelter of an abbey in England and becomes involved with Edward, the Black Prince's campaign in Spain....
Created by Baroness Orczy, author of the famous Scarlet Pimpernel series, The Old Man In the Corner was one of the earliest armchair detectives, popping up with so many others in the wake of the huge popularity...
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and...
With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I’ve published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it’s all been very good and satisfying...
MANY of these stories of field life were written for the little ones of my kindergarten, and they gave so much pleasure, and aroused such a new interest in "the meadow people," that it has seemed wise to collect...
Vast gold robberies--a murder of which a nobleman stands accused, with jealousy for the motive--these apparently unrelated mysteries give scope for Cleek's most ingenious solutions.
An ex-cracksman turned Scotland Yard detective, Cleek's slim and faultlessly dressed form is topped by an india-rubber-like face, of which he has remarkable control. With the power to distort and transform his...
A man mysteriously murdered at night, the figures 2x4 x 1x2 scrawled on his shirt front, a broken shoe-polish label beside him. Cleek solved it. Can you?