A GRINNING,
LEERING SKULL!
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In dozens of dumbfounding novels, Harry Stephen Keeler catapulted the mystery genre into an absurdity that has yet to be equaled. Now, the Collins Library is proudly ushering his best-loved work, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, back into print, and, for the rest of the week, we're proud to offer it to you for $5 off.
Here's what Paul Collins has to say:
There are mystery writers, and then there are writers who are themselves a mystery. Harry Stephen Keeler is truly and gloriously both.
Born the same year as Agatha Christie, Keeler (1890-1967) was, for a time, an even more prolific writer of mysteries, publishing from the 1920s to the late 1940s over 50 of the most eccentric novels ever written. In a Keeler novel, you're liable to find yourself tracking an escaped lunatic alongside a narrator who constantly shifts identities (The Mysterious Mr. I, 1937), solving a murder with a Sherlock Holmes-like detective who is in fact a retarded janitor (The Green Jade Hand, 1930), and pondering a suspect in the form of the "Flying Strangler-Baby" (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936) ... this being a midget who, dressed as an adorable little tyke, swoops down to garrote his victim from a miniature helicopter.
Keeler is sometimes called the best worst writer ever—the Ed Wood of the mystery genre. His plots consist of one jaw-droppingly unlikely coincidence after another; his writing reads like a drunken translation, filled with clangorous similes and characters spouting loopy "dialects" that, though they may be ostensibly German or Cockney, seem to originate primarily in Keeler's own cracked imagination. But the combined effect of his writing is, strange to say, joyous.
Among those lucky few who have known and relished rare old copies of his out-of-print work, you find many writers and editors, precisely because Keeler does everything you are never supposed to do as a novelist. Want tight plotting? Forget it: you can read a Keeler 10 times and still not figure it out. Want believable characters? Meet Screamo the Clown, Scientifico Greenlimb, and Legga the Human Spider. And remember that old saw about how you introduce all the characters in the first third of the book? Well, in one Keeler novel, the killer is introduced in the last sentence.
But then, every Keeler novel is a sucker punch to the reader. It was brilliantly cruel of Keeler's publisher, E.P. Dutton & Co., to insert at around page 200 of his mysteries an illustrated promotional page proclaiming: "STOP! At this point all the characters have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery. CAN YOU DO IT?"
Well ... no. As a matter of fact, you can't do it.
Yet there is a design within Keeler's chaos. He kept thick files of odd stories that he clipped out from newspapers and magazines; to start a novel, he'd grab random fistfuls of them and then attempt to somehow madly tie all their threads together. Keeler explained his approach to plotting in "The Mechanics and Kinematics of Web Work Plot Construction," an April 1928 article for Author and Journalist magazine, and illustrated it with a plot diagram of his 1924 debut, The Voice of the Seven Sparrows. His resulting schematic plot drawings are so furiously tangled that they resemble nothing so much as the Tube Map for the London Underground.
What Keeler grasped is that readers will allow a plot to be endlessly folded and mutilated as long as it is attached to the spindle of a recognizable genre. In The Skull of the Waltzing Clown, the plot barely happens at all, as most of the book consists of a shaggy-dog backstory related in the living room of the narrator's uncle; in a touch worthy of Tristram Shandy, the old man spends one entire chapter lecturing his nephew on the history of safes and safecracking. The following year, even the narrative itself was jettisoned. By The Marceau Case (1936), Keeler had embarked on a trilogy of "documented novels"—these being evidence dossiers of photographs, torn fragments of notes, telegrams, and maps—that left the creation of the narrative up to the reader. It was a technique that put Keeler at the edge of the Modernist avant-garde, right alongside John Dos Passos and his "newsreel" technique in The Big Money (1936). But because Keeler was a pulp mystery writer pounding out a new book every few months, his wild experimentation went largely unnoticed.
Examine the mystery novel, and you begin to see how Keeler might be the Platonic ideal of the genre—the truest mystery novelist who ever lived. Why? Because in the real world, a crime is almost always reducible to the simplest answer. The husband did it—the angry neighbor did it—the guy packing a gun in the nightclub parking lot did it. But a mystery plot depends on an eccentric outsider running around insisting that unlikely conspiracies and coincidences are in fact the only truly logical explanations. The mystery is an insanely paranoiac construction that cleverly masquerades as the height of rationality.
This is the mystery of Mysteries: it is a completely compelling literary genre conjured out of pure humbug. Harry Stephen Keeler takes the implicit absurdity of the mystery and makes it explicit—and he does it so ecstatically, and with such utter belief in his creation, that it becomes a thing of wonder.
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