The House Without A Key

ONE BROOCH, A PAGE FROM A GUEST BOOK--

one cigarette stub of a certain kind, an illuminated wrist-watch with the figure two effaced.

That's what they had to go on after they found old Dan Winterslip had been murdered. Old Dan was an ungodly cuss, but he had bought respectability with riches, and he had a way about him. Handsome and genial, his living presence kept the stories of his past down. Dead, they swarmed, like the wings of preying birds, with the lurid details of his old sailing days when the gold stuff was just coming in.

The most famous of fiction detectives--the lovable Charlie Chan--with his charm, his broken English, his Chinese philosophy, and his ability to use his head, ran these few scattered clues right down to the man who slipped on that moonless night into the house without a key.

This is a corking murder story--one of the most perplexing and fascinating of the inimitable Charlie Chan cases.