Since Edgar Allan Poe invented the modern mystery story in 1841, everyone from Nobel Prize winners to functional illiterates have tried their hands at the form, creating everything from brilliant literature to unreadable tripe. But few stories have even remotely resembled the works of Harry Stephen Keeler. In his 50-odd–make that quite odd–mysteries, the Chicagoan created a hysterical alternate universe full of eccentric characters, peculiar events, and seemingly random insanity. He’s been out of print in English since 1953, but a small, growing cult preserves the memory of Keeler, the most bizarre mystery writer of all time.
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The standard Keeler novel opens with the squeaky-clean protagonist (invariably thrifty, reverent, brave, ambitious, and penniless) caught in some pickle that makes a catch-22 pale by comparison. His creditors are baying at the door, with his enemies not far behind. He may be the unwitting victim of a nefarious capitalist plot to foreclose on his mortgage, steal his inheritance, or defraud him of his patent. Through a bizarre chain of coincidences he finds himself implicated in some crime. His alibi is worthless, his witnesses dead, abroad, or otherwise incommunicado. He’s deeply in love, but his fiancee can never simply tie the knot; she’s pledged to stay single until some rare book is procured or a one-act vaudeville play produced. He may be the beneficiary of a will, but he has to do something strange, like wear a pair of weird glasses for a year or decipher the meaning of a bag of beans, before he can collect his inheritance. And then chaos ensues, as the hero and various minor characters careen about town like pinballs trying to untangle the twisted web. Subplots might involve weird curios, circus freaks, concealed identities, trepanation, and mysterious (but not sinister!) Chinese laundries. It’s pure pulp fiction, but zanily transformed as if it’s gone through the looking glass once too often.
Keeler was that rare bird, the unaffected yet totally self-aware eccentric. He’s often pigeonholed with Z-movie director Ed Wood; the two share a wacky appeal. But whereas Wood achieved his most memorable effects unintentionally, Keeler put considerable thought into his books. It’s easy to picture the man sitting at his typewriter, chuckling madly as he concocted even goofier plot twists.
In Thieves’ Nights (1929) the protagonist picks up a manuscript, and the story he begins reading–which takes up about 40 percent of the book–is about a man entertaining the governor with a series of stories about “Bayard DeLancy, the King of Thieves.” That’s three, count ’em, three levels of narration. It’s easy to forget that you’re actually reading a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. When the action finally returns to the protagonist in the outermost level of the story (who’s involved in a wacky imposture plot triggered by a weird will), the effect is startling. Then who should walk into the outer circle of the story but Bayard DeLancy himself!
Keeler’s literary fortunes peaked in the 30s, when he burst past the confines of the web-work novel to create what he called “meganovels.” First came massive works like The Matilda Hunter Murder (1930, 741 pages) and The Box From Japan (1932, 765 pages). The latter, running about 360,000 words, is the longest single-volume mystery novel ever published in English; Keeler happily described it as “perfectly adapted to jack up a truck with.” He preferred to run a continuous roll of paper through his typewriter so he wouldn’t have to stop writing to insert a fresh sheet. Eventually Keeler turned to multivolume epics, madcap masterpieces spanning as many as five books, wherein he achieved the acme of his nutty art. “The Aeronautic Baby Strangler Case” takes up The Marceau Case (1936) and X. Jones of Scotland Yard, but tangents pop up in three other novels. Eccentric millionaire Andre Marceau is found garroted in the center of a freshly rolled croquet lawn. Childlike footprints are found near the corpse, but they don’t reach the edge of the lawn–as if their maker vanished into thin air! A mysterious autogiro (a primitive ancestor of the helicopter) is spotted hovering over the lawn at the time of the murder.
In 1948 Phoenix Press dropped him, leaving Keeler without a publisher in his native land. Just as the British publishers had picked up on him first, so they stuck with him after America had forsaken him. But even the British were losing their taste for Keeler. His last book published in Britain, Stand By–London Calling!, came out in 1953. Since then, Keeler has been totally out of print in English.
