The Riddle of Harry Stephen Keeler
When I first left Philadelphia in 1990, I thought back over all the people I’d known there, and realized much to my amazement that they all knew one another somehow, even if only in passing, and that I had nothing to do with it—everyone knew everyone through some other channel. There were writers, musicians, filmmakers and visual artists, most of whom I met through my work at a local alternative weekly. Given how small and insular Philly’s creative community was in the late ’80s, maybe it’s not so shocking they would come to know each other. But there were others in the mix, too—bartenders, publicists, club owners, dealers, journalists, waiters, academics, witches, common drunks, museum directors and political extremists. And they all knew each other.
It was an amazing web of characters. I took some time and backtracked through all the coincidental encounters with this and that person, how those lead to these others, then still others, until I had the whole, rambling picture of all these unlikely acquaintances and how they were tied together. Once I’d saw the finished puzzle and laid it all out on a large piece of cork board with pushpins and different colored thread to signify different paths of connection, I started thinking it might be an interesting tack to use in a book—knowing the singular picture at the end before starting, then going back to the beginning and tracing out the whole twisty web, coincidence after coincidence, until some final big revelation.
Well, I’m too lazy to put that much work into anything, so instead I decided to write silly meandering books with plenty of meaningless coincidences and bizarre, unlikely twists of their own, all made up on the fly as I went along.
Whenever anyone asks me to name my literary influences (and granted no one has in awhile) I always trot out the same tired litany of respectable forebears: Mr. Pynchon, Celine, Henry Miller, Dostoevsky, Vonnegut, James Thurber, Jim Thompson and the like.
While all that remains true, had I read anything by Harry Stephen Keeler before I fell into the unwholesome business of writing novels, I would have, without hesitation, cited him as a primary literary influence. Perhaps the one and only true literary influence on what I ended up doing. But I hadn’t read anything by him. In fact, I never read anything by Keeler prior to the end of 2021. I’d first heard of Keeler about a decade ago, and more or less knew what sorts of things he was up to, at least in very broad strokes. It all sounded interesting and right up my alley, but I simply never got around to reading him. If you haven’t heard of him, don’t worry, because nobody has. He’s kind of like the W. Lee Wilder of American letters, and just as forgotten.
One of the things that prevented me from reading him a decade back was the simple fact none of his books were available in digital form. In a blink though, and not that long ago, there were dozens of Keeler eBooks out there. I’ve since consumed five or six of his 50-plus novels, and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to stop. I hadn’t even finished the first one I picked up, The Green Jade Hand (1930), when I found myself thinking, “everything I’ve done I’ve lifted from Keeler.” In fact, everything I wanted to do, even if I haven’t done it yet, and even if there was no way I could have realized it, I lifted from Keeler.
Keeler’s story takes some telling.
He was a prolific pulp novelist who worked from the mid-1910s through the early ’60s. Although he published the occasional sci fi novel or Western, mysteries made up the lion’s share of his output, but mysteries unlike any other. The adjective “quite utterly insane” comes to mind.
Let me back up a spell.
Harry Stephen Keeler was born in Chicago in 1890. He would spend much of his life there, and it would be the detailed setting of several, if not most of his novels. He began writing stories for the pulp magazines in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was in his teens. Around age 20, and for reasons never fully disclosed, Keeler’s mother had him committed to a mental institution. This may well help explain why unjustly imprisoned or institutionalized characters (and those who escape from prisons and asylums) would be a recurring theme in his books.
It’s unclear how long he was institutionalized, but in 1915 he received a bit of attention for is speculative fiction story “John Jones’ Dollar,” which appeared in the venerable early pulp magazine The Black Cat. (Twelve years later, the story was republished in Amazing Stories.)
In 1919 he got a degree in electrical engineering and married Hazel Goodwin, a writer herself, who would remain his wife and occasional collaborator until her death in 1960. Keeler took a job as an electrician, and spent his nights writing.
His first novel, The Voice of the Seven Sparrows, was published in England in 1924. His first four novels were published in England exclusively. His books didn’t begin appearing in the US until 1927, when he signed with E.P. Dutton. Over the next 15 years, Dutton published 37 Keeler novels, including The Skull of the Waltzing Clown, The Defrauded Yeggman, and Y. Cheung, Business Detective. His books were still coming out in the UK as well, but usually after some heavy-handed editing and often under new and far less interesting titles.
The question is, how do you even begin to talk about an author whose books were so damnably and deliberately confounding? In the case of someone like, say, Thomas Pynchon or Robert Coover, beneath the complex, intertwining plots you have the gorgeous prose, the deeply imbedded cultural and historical references, the rich metaphors, the sheer literary genius of it all. You can’t really accuse Keeler of any of those things.
In the first half of the twentieth century, writing at the same time as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, readers found Keeler’s books fascinating, baffling, and often frustrating as hell. Apart from what he termed his “webwork plots,” in which each character encountered spins off into his or her own (sometimes only vaguely connected) storyline until the book becomes a dense lacework of characters and labyrinthine plots, his books were also notable for hilariously improbable coincidences and neat and tidy resolutions that don’t quite hold up if you think about them too hard. The latter leaves me thinking Keeler himself got lost in the web along the way, forgetting what he’d written in earlier chapters, and sometimes earlier books. That may help explain how he ended up using the same extremely unlikely contrivance to resolve a murder in two different novels, both written in 1930.
Trying to offer a plot summary of any of his novels to the uninitiated is, in a word, impossible. Even trying to summarize what happens in the first three chapters of any given novel would be an exercise in futility. Here, for example, is an early paragraph from one of his more popular works, 1934’s The Riddle of the Traveling Skull:
“For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie.”
Therein lay some of the charm in reading Keeler. You never know what’s going to happen on the next page. I consider myself a fairly astute reader, but so far I’ve never once been able to guess how the book I’m reading is going to end.
Let me offer sort of an example.
In 1937, Keeler wrote a longish novel entitled I, Chameleon. His editor at Dutton was so vexed and flummoxed by Keeler’s unending sleight of hand he chopped the book in two, releasing the first part as The Mysterious Mr. I in 1937, and the second as The Chameleon in 1939. The two were recently rejoined by, I believe, Ramble House and released under its original title.
The book opens with a man stepping off a bus in a shady part of Chicago at 4 in the morning. He’s carrying a skull under his arm and is looking for a doctor. The book takes place over the course of 20 hours, and between 4 a.m. and midnight, the man adopts 50 different personalities, from a philosophy professor to a famous race car driver, for no apparent purpose. AS each chapter begins he assures readers and other characters alike that this time he really is exposing his true self under his real name. Then in the final lines of the chapter he confesses that no, it was another ruse. The entire book progresses this way until the final line, at which point you just want to punch the author.
Here’s another example. The Skull of The Waltzing Clown (1935) (and yes indeed, a waltzing clown’s skull is central to the plot) opens very slowly, with a conversation between an uncle and his traveling shirt salesman nephew. The conversation rolls on for 15 chapters. When the actual plot is at last revealed, things finally start happening. Then quite suddenly a few short chapters later, the story comes to an abrupt, though quintessentially Keeleresque, end with a single line—a big revelation that makes absolutely no sense. It has me thinking, considering the hard realities of writing for the pulps, Keeler slammed into a deadline, so had to come up with something, some way to wrap things up, and quick. The End.
His novels, like David Goodis’ a generation later, are marked by recurring themes and obsessions, from skulls to the color crimson to the Chinese. Also, there are no good cops or doctors in Keeler novels. Doctors, especially psychiatrists, are generally oily lying snitches., while the cops are all fat, crude and dumb. I’ve yet to encounter a Keeler book in which a cop actually solves a crime, most of which are solved instead by ex-cons, secretaries, circus folk or hobos.
Thinking about it just now, his dependence on unlikely coincidences and his fixation on the Chinese may well hint Keeler was equally inspired by Dickens and Sax Rohmer, another Keeler contemporary, who authored the Fu Manchui novels, especially with all those Fu Manchu references cropping up regularly in Keeler’s work.
As for Keeler’s prose, well, it can be very good at times. There are moments when, in the form of an internal monologue or simple descriptive passage, he can sparkle, as in this excerpt from 1929’s Thieve’s Nights, in which he draws parallels between Chicago and London:
“Here ... were seemingly the same hawkers ... selling the same goods ... here too was the confusion, the babble of tongues of many lands, the restless, shoving throng containing faces and features of a thousand racial castes, and last but not least, here on Halsted and Maxwell streets, Chicago, were the same dirt, flying bits of torn paper, and confusion that graced the junction of Middlesex and Whitechapel High streets far across the globe.”
There are also times when he can be godawful. He has the unfortunate habit of relying too heavily on the adverb. Not just common, ordinary adverbs, but adverbs that exist nowhere else in the history of written English save for Keeler novels: “Sepulcherly,” “airy-fairyly,” “feelingly,”
“disgruntledly.” And most are used repeatedly. My screen reader always gags on these, forcing me to listen to a sentence three or four times to figure out just what the hell he’s saying. “Sepulchrely”?
But Keeler’s novels aren’t about the prose. They’re like thrill rides—you buy your ticket, strap yourself in, and hold on until the end, never knowing when you’re going to hit that crazy corkscrew or stomach-dropping plunge. And you know? Even if the conclusion doesn’t really hold up given the plot details which preceded it, Keeler hasn’t disappointed me yet. To go back to the amusement park thrill ride analogy, my reaction is generally the same as reaching the end of a ride at Knott’s Berry Farm: namely, “How the hell did he do that?” Also like thrill rides, the minute you climb out of the car, woozy and with shaky legs, you just want to go to the end of the line so you can do it again. Not helping that response is his habit of dropping blatant references to his own previous works into the text.
I think what most impresses me about him was his ability, over the course of a 50 year career, to continue not just writing, but thinking along these tangled, serpentine paths, yet always bringing everything together in the end. He may have employed the occasional Big Cheat to wrap things up, but there was still a bit of genius about it.
The more sensitive and cretinous out there would no doubt be scandalized by Keeler’s regular employment of ethnic stereotypes and phonetically transliterated dialects. His black characters all sound like Amos and Andy, and his Chinese characters sound like Mr. Magoo’s faithful, bucktoothed, ponytailed manservant Cholly.
Speaking of which, a recent edition of his previously unpublished The Man Who Changed His Skin is loaded down at the outset with disclaimers and warnings from the publisher, given it concerns a white Bostonian English history teacher who finds his consciousness transmigrated into the body of a young poor black day laborer. So yes, there’s crude stereotyping afoot, but the really shocking thing, considering it was written in the ’30s, is that in the end it’s a fiercely anti-racist novel. If you encounter an openly racist character in any Keeler novel, you can trust he or she is a villain of some stripe. As naive and a product of its time as it may be, The Man Who Changed His Skin is far less offensive than some more modern and self-righteous anti-racist screeds written by comfortable whites with Ivy League educations. Dialects aside, he never demeans his ethnic characters (save for Irish cops), who are usually presented as far more honorable than his upstanding whites.
But I’m getting off point.
Dutton dropped Keeler in 1942 after publishing The Book With the Orange Leaves, deciding his novels were simply getting too incoherent. His books continued to come out in the UK for the next decade, but even the Brits were starting to have their doubts. Given he was usually being paid by the word or the page, he was clearly padding his novels with interminable dialogues that roll on for pages and add nothing to the story. In some cases—and you gotta love this—he would occasionally, and with no real justification plot-wise, have a character open a book or magazine and begin reading a story. At that point he would drop in one of his wife’s short stories in its entirety. When the story came to an end, the character would close the magazine and the novel would pick up again where it left off. He did the same thing with newspaper stories. Keeler apparently obsessively clipped and saved newspaper accounts of strange events and odd crimes, and if they fit into what he was working on (and even if they didn’t) he would drop them into the text verbatim, often with a marginal note to his editor assuring him the repurposed news item was true.
After his British publisher dropped him in 1952, he had a hard time getting published for the rest of the decade. He did sign with what amounted to a poverty row publishing house, who sold his novels as they could to foreign markets, his novels being translated into Spanish and portuguese, but unavailable in English. In the meantime he took a job editing one of the less respectable pulp magazines, often filling the margins with jokes and shameless plugs for his own books. (This may help explain the character in I, Chameleon who at one point passes himself off as a comedy writer.) Still, he continued to write his off-kilter novels, occasionally in collaboration with his wife.
His wife Hazel died of cancer in 1960, shortly after the pair collaborated on a mind-boggler entitled The Case of the Two-Headed Idiot, which remains one of the greatest titles of all time. And I’m pleased to report a two-headed idiot does indeed make a pivotal appearance toward the end of the tale, offering up a vital Clue necessary to solve the crime at hand.
Shortly after his wife died, Keeler married his secretary and continued writing. His last (and apparently notorious( novel was 1965’s The Scarlet Mummy, which I’ve yet to track down.
He died in 1967, leaving a mountain of unpublished manuscripts behind.
At the time of his death, most of Keeler’s works were long out of print, and he was all but completely forgotten.
Then a strange, almost Keeleresque thing happened. Several decades after his death, Keeler was rediscovered by a handful of twisted, and possibly quite mad, readers and publishers. In the late ’90s, a fellow named Fender Tucker launched The Harry Stephen Keeler Society out of Xavier University. The Society then launched a small Keeler-centric indie publisher, Ramble House, which has released numerous Keeler titles, including several not published in his lifetime. In 2003, Paul Collins, who ran the McSweeney’s imprint The Collins Library, published Keeler’s The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. Ramble House and Collins were soon joined by another Keeler-centric indie, Wild Side Press. For chrissakes, even my old pubblisher, Simon and Schuster, got in on the game, reprinting a handful of titles, including The Amazing Web, Sing Sing Nights, The Fourth King and The Washington Square Enigma. And they dumped me because they thought my books were too “weird” and “quirky”? Oh, fuck you.
Anyway, I’m awfully glad to see Keeler finally receive a long overdue scrap of validation. He’s at the top of my list, and unless I can find a way to force myself to stop reading him, he may comprise the entire list before long.
By Jim Knipfel