Harry Stephen Keeler

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"We are drawn to the unescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy."

--The New York Times, 1942

Harry Stephen Keeler (November 3, 1890 - January 22, 1967) was a prolific but little-known American author. In many ways, he was the quintessential writer—one who wrote for the love of writing, regardless of popularity, profit, or any other external factors.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] Overview

Born in Chicago in 1890, Keeler spent his childhood exclusively in this city, which was so beloved by the author that a large number of his works took place in and around it. In many of his novels, Keeler refers to Chicago as "the London of the west." The expression is explained in the opening of Thieves' Nights (1929): "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." Other locales for Keeler novels include New Orleans and New York. In his later works, Keeler's settings are often more generic settings such as Big River, or a city in which all buildings and streets are either nameless or fictional. Keeler is known to have visited London at least once, but his occasional depictions of British characters are consistently implausible.

Keeler's mother was a widow several times over who operated a boarding house popular with theatrical performers. Beginning around age sixteen, Keeler pumped out a steady stream of original short stories and serials that were subsequently published in many small pulp magazines of the day. He attended the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), graduating with a degree in electrical engineering.

When Keeler was about twenty, his mother committed him to an insane asylum for reasons unknown to us, thus fostering his interest in the insane, insane asylums and the sane who had been committed to such places, as well as a life-long violent antipathy towards the psychiatric profession.

After graduation, he took a job as an electrician in a steel mill, working by day and writing by night. It was at this time that Keeler met his future wife, Hazel Goodwin, whom he married in 1919.

Published in 1924, Keeler's first novel, The Voice of the Seven Sparrows, introduced audiences the world over to Keeler's complicated story lines, wildly improbable in-story coincidences and sometimes sheerly baffling conclusions. Unfortunately, Keeler's complex, labyrinthine stories alienated his intended reading audience who were, at this point, generally accustomed to simplistic stories about young men from other planets defending the galaxy and wise-cracking detectives wrapped up in murder mysteries.

Because of this, however, Keeler began to gain some notoriety in the mid-1930s as a purveyor of new and original stories. His popularity was realized when, in 1934, his book Sing Sing Nights was made into two different B-grade horror films, one of which starred screen legend Bela Lugosi. During this period Keeler was employed as an editor for Ten Story Book, a popular pulp short-story magazine that also included photos of nude and scantily clad young women. Keeler proceeded to fill the spaces between the stories with his own peculiar brand of humor, as well as illustrations by his wife. (He also included frequent publicity for his own books.)

In spite of his popularity, Keeler's fiction and writing style grew increasingly bizarre, often substituting laboriously lengthy dialogues and diatribes between characters for action or plot. These events led his American publisher, Dutton, to drop him in 1942. The next eleven years were hard for Keeler as his writing drifted even further beyond the norm and short stories written by his wife (a moderately successful writer herself) were found increasingly within his novels. Keeler typically padded the length of his novels with the following device: his protagonist would find a magazine or book, would open it randomly and discover a story. At this point, Keeler's novel would stop dead in its tracks and he would insert the complete verbatim text of one of his wife's short stories, this being the story his novel's protagonist was reading. At the end of the story, the novel would continue where it left off, several pages nearer to its contractual minimum word count. These stories-within-the-novel typically contained only a few scraps of information that were relevant to the novel in which they appeared.

Keeler's novels were picked up by rental library publisher Phoenix Press, known in the business as the last stop on the publishing bus. By 1953 British publishers Ward Lock printed their final Keeler novel, thus forcing the writer to pen his stories exclusively for an overseas market with stories often translated for publication in Spain and Portugal.

Hazel died in 1960. Pressing forward, Keeler was remarried in 1963 (to his onetime secretary Thelma Rinaldo), which rejuvenated his spirit for writing. Unfortunately, many of the new stories written by Keeler during this time went unpublished, including the relatively infamous The Scarlet Mummy. Keeler died four years later in 1967, leaving behind a legacy of creativity for his fans everywhere.

In 2005, The Collins Library (an imprint of McSweeney's) republished Keeler's 1934 classic, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, a project much pursued by writer and publisher Paul Collins.

[edit] Writing Trademarks

Most of Keeler's novels feature a "webwork plot." This can be defined as a plot that includes many strands or threads (each thread representing a character or significant object), which intersect in complex causal interactions. A webwork novel typically ends with a surprise revelation that clarifies these interactions retrospectively. According to Keeler's 1927 series of articles on plot theory, "The Mechanics (And Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction," a webwork plot is typically built around a sequence in which the main character intersects at least four other strands, one after the other, and each of these encounters causes the next one. Keeler never claimed to have invented the webwork plot, but only to be its theorist and practitioner.

Keeler followed a writing procedure of his own; he'd often write a huge manuscript, perhaps twice the length required. He'd then cut it down to size, removing unnecessary subplots and incidents. The removed material (which he called "The Chunk") would sit around until Keeler wrote another manuscript to use it — which might result in yet another cutting procedure, and another "Chunk." He also incorporated stories by his wife. A Keeler protagonist searching for clues might find a mysterious book and read it, with the effect of putting an unrelated short story into the first narrative for a chapter or more. In his book Thieves' Nights, the hero reads a book which is about two other men telling stories: a framing device within a framing device. In another book, Keeler and his wife turn up as characters in a story.

Keeler also kept a large file of newspaper clippings featuring unusual stories and incidents. He is reputed to have pasted these into the rough outlines of his novels, adding notes like "Have this happen to...."

Keeler is known for the MacGuffin-esque insertion of skulls into nearly all his stories. While many plots revolved around a skull or the use of one in a crime or ritual, others featured skulls merely as a side diversion, including one case where a human skull was used as a paperweight on the desk of a police detective.

Several of Keeler's novels make reference to a (fictitious) book titled The Way Out, which is apparently a tome of ancient Oriental wisdom. (Keeler had many bizarre beliefs about Orientals and blacks.) The significance of the nonexistent Way Out in Keeler's universe is equivalent to the role played by the Necronomicon within H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

[edit] Influence

Harry Stephen Keeler has influenced a number of science fiction witers such as Neil Gaiman and Futurama producer Ken Keeler (no relation), who used the story "Strange Romance" from the book Y. Cheung, Business Detective as the basis for the episode "Time Keeps on Slippin'". In the late 1930s, British writer John Russell Fearn gave credit to Keeler for inspiring his experiments with webwork plots in his pulp SF stories.

Writer Jack Woodford wrote the article Tale Incredible: The True Story of Harry Stephen Keeler‘s Literary Rise about Keeler.

The film Murder Story (1989) has Christopher Lee playing a Keeler-like character who keeps a large collection of newspaper clippings as part of his "Willard Hope Technique" for writing novels, which closely resembles Keeler's "webwork novel" technique.

The film The Mysterious Mr. Wong was based on Keeler's serial The Twelve Coins of Confucius.[1]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Series

Tuddleton Trotter Series

  • The Matilda Hunter Murder (1931)
  • The Case of the Barking Clock
  • The Trap

Marceau Series

  • The Marceau Case (1935)
  • X. Jones—Of Scotland Yard (1935)
  • The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne (1935)
  • Y. Cheung, Business Detective

The Mysterious Mr. I

  • The Mysterious Mr. I
  • The Chameleon

Vagabond Nights

  • The Skull of the Waltzing Clown
  • The Defrauded Yeggman
  • 10 Hours
  • When Thief Meets Thief

Hallowe’en Nights

  • Finger! Finger!
  • Behind That Mask

Adventures of a Skull

  • The Man with the Magic Eardrums
  • The Man with the Crimson Box
  • The Man with the Wooden Spectacles
  • The Case of the Lavender Gripsack

The Big River Trilogy

  • The Portrait of Jirjohn Cobb
  • Cleopatra’s Tears
  • The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal (1942)

Circus Series

  • The Vanishing Gold Truck
  • The Ace of Spades Murder
  • The Case of the Jeweled Ragpicker
  • Stand By—London Calling!
  • The Case of the Crazy Corpse
  • The Circus Stealers
  • A Copy of Beowulf
  • Report on Vanessa Hewstone
  • The Six from Nowhere
  • The Case of the Two-Headed Idiot

The Way Out Series

  • The Peacock Fan
  • The Sharkskin Book
  • The Book with the Orange Leaves
  • The Case of the Two Strange Ladies
  • The Case of the 16 Beans

Steeltown Series

  • The Case of the Canny Killer
  • The Steeltown Strangler
  • The Crimson Cube

Quiribus Brown Series

  • The Murdered Mathematician
  • The Case of the Flying Hands

Hong Lei Chung Series

  • The Strange Will
  • The Street of a Thousand Eyes
  • The Six from Nowhere
  • The Riddle of the Wooden Parrakeet

Ramble House Series

  • The White Circle
  • I Killed Lincoln at 10:13!
  • Strange Journey

[edit] Non-Series novels

  • Adventure in Milwaukee
  • The Affair of the Bottled Deuce
  • The Amazing Web
  • The Blackmailer
  • The Box from Japan
  • The Case of the Ivory Arrow
  • The Case of the Mysterious Moll
  • The Case of the Transparent Nude
  • The Case of the Transposed Legs
  • The Face of the Man from Saturn
  • Find the Clock
  • The Five Silver Buddhas
  • The Flyer Hold-Up
  • The Fourth King
  • The Gallows Waits, My Lord
  • The Green Jade Hand
  • Hangman's Nights
  • The Iron Ring
  • The Man Who Changed His Skin
  • The Monocled Monster
  • The Murder of London Lew
  • The Mysterious Card
  • The Mysterious Ivory Ball of Wong Shing Li
  • The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman
  • The Photo of Lady X
  • Riddle of the Travelling Skull (1934)
  • The Scarlet Mummy (1965)
  • The Search for X-Y-Z
  • Sing Sing Nights
  • The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro (1924)
  • The Straw Hat Murders
  • The Stolen Gravestone
  • Thieves' Nights
  • The Tiger Snake, aka The Yellow Zuri
  • The Voice of the Seven Sparrows
  • The Washington Square Enigma

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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