The condemned man asked for three things before he climbed the thirteen steps to the gallows: a glass eye, a champagne cork and a wooden parrakeet. Can any mystery writer - other than Chicago paper blackener Harry Stephen Keeler - have proposed such a scenario? And then written a huge meganovel filled with celestials and tong lore to explain why the condemned man should make such a request? Written in the late 50s, when Keeler was no longer being published by his American and British publishers, this novel, according to Keeler scholar Francis M. Nevins, is "The big one. El Gordo. The nonesuch. The nonpareil. The sockdolager. The kafoozalus of wackadoodledom." It's all that - and more. This 345-page trade paperback contains the complete text of the novel written in 1960, but never published in English.