Hazel Goodwin Keeler – författare

"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 wasn’t fair! Just because Joe "Zicky" Czeszczicki had the misfortune to hire as his lawyer, ''Golden-Tongue'' Winfrock, who died right before the trial, Joe was slated to die in 48 hours! There''s no way a man accused of murdering a State''s Attorney could beat those kinds of odds. But Joe didn''t know about Crystal Armswayne of London and how she would figure into his life -- and he knew even less about Tuddleton T. Trotter, ingenious author of Mathematics versus Crime. All of these threads -- and more -- come together in a masterwork of webworkian logic! [Note: This is the longer, British version of the book.]

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?

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.