Books with title KEEPER OF THE KEYS - A Charlie Chan Mystery

In the 6th and final book in the mystery series featuring the Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan, we find our hero in Lake Tahoe, California. Chan has been invited as a house guest. He meets a glamorous Out of Printera singer, Ellen Landini, and she is murdered by a gunshot during a party. Her servants and four of her ex-husbands are suspects in the case, all with weak alibis. It is up to Chan to solve the murder. The clues are cryptic and misleading by nature: the singer's own revolver, two scarves, two cigarette boxes with mismatched lids, and the actions of a little dog named Trouble. Part of the solution to the mystery involves an elderly Chinese servant named Ah Sing--the keeper of the keys. Chan solves the case in his usual understated, spectacular fashion.

Near Fine book in a Good, essentially complete jacket. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932. First Edition. Small octavo, 307 pp. Cloth, illustrated endpapers, with the scarce and well-known deco jacket. A Charlie Chan caper, sprinkled throughout with the Asian-American sleuth's proverbial bon mots and keen deductions. Condition: Jacket chipped and with short tears and creases and spine a bit sunned; volume cloth clean and bright; ownership signature at flyleaf; Near Fine in Good jacket which shows several notable chips but which has not been clipped and is essentially complete. See scans. Keeper of the Keys - the only Charlie Chan novel not made into a movie - is also the only one in which he actually did spout non-stop clever one-liners, as we have come to expect after Warner Oland's performances in film; that characteristic of Chan's was in fact much less developed by Biggers in other titles. Keeper also shows Chan's humanistic side: in one passage, he expresses quiet regret that he has not - as his servant Ah Sing has - maintained his Chinese-ness after so many years in America. Chan feels he is neither American nor Chinese; Ah Sing - stateside longer than Chan - has sustained his ethnic identity. See scans. L57n