Skull in the Box

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!

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 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!

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.