English · Intermediate
Read The House Without a Key in Englishwith every sentence explained
Earl Derr Biggers · 1925
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under mystery and crime. It runs to about 82,300 words.
Palm trees. A moonlit beach. A murder in paradise. Enter Charlie Chan.
Miss Minerva Winterslip came to Honolulu from Boston for six weeks and has stayed for ten months, enchanted by Waikiki. Her family sends her nephew John Quincy, a very proper young Bostonian, to bring her home. He arrives just in time for a shock: their wealthy cousin Dan Winterslip, a man with a colourful past, is found stabbed to death in his beach house.
The Honolulu police put their best man on the case, a calm, polite and quietly brilliant detective named Charlie Chan. Clues are few: a newspaper torn in anger, a page ripped from the guest book, the glowing dial of a wristwatch seen in the dark. And as John Quincy is drawn into the hunt, the islands start to work their magic on him too.
The first Charlie Chan mystery, The House Without a Key launched one of the most famous detectives of the 20th century, star of dozens of films.
- Author
- Earl Derr Biggers
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Mystery and Crime
- Length
- About 82,300 words
How it opens
Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic age. Yet beauty thrilled her still, even the semi-barbaric beauty of a Pacific island. As she walked slowly along the beach she felt the little catch in her throat that sometimes she had known in Symphony Hall, Boston, when her favorite orchestra rose to some new and unexpected height of loveliness.
Reading The House Without a Key in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
