Lousy Lou Ousley, the detective, has been given another impossible case: the murder or suicide of a crackpot novelist in a locked room. Everything points to suicide but there's the sticky point of the gun being made of wax. And what's with the bottle on the desk with a deuce of diamonds inside it? In this novel, written in 1958 but never published anywhere until now, Harry Stephen Keeler pulls out all the stops and creates a tale that Arthur Conan Doyle might have written. With an introduction by noted author and Keeler scholar Francis M. Nevins, and a mapback by Gavin L. O'Keefe.