Harry Stephen Keeler

• Born: November 3, 1890
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: January 22, 1967
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator

Principal Series: Tuddleton Trotter, 1931-1947; Angus MacWhorter, 1941-1953

Contribution

Harry Stephen Keeler wrote more than seventy novels throughout his career and met with success in several countries, including Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, and the United States. His principal contribution to the mystery and detective genre is his bizarre “webwork novel,” in which outlandish, melodramatic plots, subplots, and sub-subplots are piled atop one another. These intricate “webbings” grow into a dizzying pyramid of coincidences and interlocking connections—a plot that threatens to topple but that Keeler skillfully resolves. Keeler’s mastery of plot has elicited awe and admiration from his loyal admirers. He is also known for his uncanny ability to mix humor and horror to stunning effect.

Biography

Harry Stephen Keeler was born in Chicago on November 3, 1890. While Keeler was still in his infancy, his father died. His mother soon remarried, this time to an unstable and irresponsible adventurer who gambled away her husband’s legacy and soon afterward committed suicide. To provide for herself and her son, his mother began to operate an old-fashioned boardinghouse that catered to a theatrical clientele. After her third marriage—to a husband who died within three years—the family was compelled to live on a meager income.

Young Harry pitched in to help his mother by shoveling snow and delivering an early-morning newspaper. An indifferent student, he boasted later that while grammar and rhetoric were being taught in his high school, he was playing hooky and fishing in Lake Michigan. In 1912, however, he obtained a degree in electrical engineering from Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology.

Employed as an electrician in a south Chicago steel mill, Keeler began writing short stories on the side. He sold his first crime story, “Victim No. 5,” to Young’s Magazine in 1914 for ten dollars. Keeler spent the next decade writing and selling dozens of his novellas and short stories to various detective pulp magazines.

In 1919, he was married to short-story writer Hazel Goodwin, who later became a crime writer herself and—especially in his later years—her husband’s collaborator. Also in 1919, Keeler became an editor for Ten-Story Book, a position he held until 1940. The next breakthrough in his career was his selling his first book-length thriller to a British publisher. He continued to write novels for American, Spanish, British, and Portuguese audiences until his American publisher in 1957 refused to issue any more of his books. Unwilling to compromise his controversial style and content, Keeler turned to publishers abroad. His English editor also decided to stop issuing his books. In this final years, only Spanish and Portuguese publishers accepted his manuscripts.

In 1960, Hazel died. Keeler grieved so intensely over her death that he was unable to continue writing. It was not until his marriage to his former secretary, Thelma Rinoldo, in 1963 that he returned to the typewriter. By now, his only audience was in Spain and Portugal, and finally his manuscripts were rejected even there. He died in 1967, convinced that his name and novels would someday be revived and that they would receive the adulation that he thought they deserved.

Analysis

As Francis Nevins, his biographer, has chronicled, Harry Stephen Keeler began his writing career as early as 1910. His first efforts were conventional stories, one of which he sold, but after his success with his first crime story, “Victim No. 5,” he began to write crime pieces almost exclusively. Nevins speculates that Keeler’s tendency toward reflection and solitude were motivated by the disasters of his early life, and that this penchant led him to writing.

Typical of Keeler’s early phase (1914-1924) is the outlandish plotting of “Victim No. 5.” The story revolves around a certain Ivan Kossakoff, a professional strangler of women, whose punishment is to die by being crushed to death by his pet boa constrictor. Already in these early tales, certain features of what became a characteristically flamboyant, overdrawn, and bizarre content and style were beginning to emerge: the propensity for freaky, unbelievable characters; the penchant for absurdly incongruous plots and situations; a stringing together of metaphors and similes to create startlingly surreal images; and the use of preposterous surnames, on which Keeler puns almost adolescently—all done in a formal, Victorian, deadpan style, with dialogue reminiscent of penny Victorian novels.

The Voice of the Seven Sparrows

In 1924, Keeler’s literary career took a new turn: Hutchinson, a British publisher, brought out his first novel, The Voice of the Seven Sparrows. In this typically wild, unconventional novel, two rival Chicago newsmen are searching for a publisher’s vanished daughter. Along the way, they encounter a Chinese millionaire who bets that he can walk across South America and a suitor who writes thousands of postcards in an attempt to find his lost lady.

The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

In another novel of this period, The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro (1926), a young innocent, Jerome Middleton, heir to a patent medicine fortune, is directed by his dead father to wear a pair of spectacles for a whole year before he can receive his inheritance. Thrown into an insane asylum by a rival for the legacy, Middleton finds the inmates saner than so-called normal people. The apparently “sane” doctor who ministers to the inmates is a mad clown appropriately named Herr Doctor Meister Professor von Zero.

Sing Sing Nights and Thieves’ Nights

In Sing Sing Nights (1928) three authors are about to be electrocuted for murder. The governor hands them a pardon for one, and only one, of the three; they are to decide among themselves who is to benefit from it. The authors agree to give the pardon to the one who can produce the best story, to be judged by one of their prison guards. Thieves’ Nights (1929), another novel of this period, concerns Ward Sharlow, who is engaged to impersonate a missing heir and in doing so runs into the typical ménage of oddball and “kooky” characters.

These novels of the 1920’s incorporate what had become typical Keeler motifs: the innocent protagonist cast into a den of malicious characters; the interruption of the main plot by ancillary characters with tales of their own—often to the effect that the main plot is overshadowed by these digressions (the “Arabian nights” technique); the usual grotesqueries, in both character and situation; and bitter social criticism denouncing all sorts of ills, from maltreatment of those who are different to the corruption of the judicial system.

The Amazing Web

In the 1930’s, Keeler began to write what Nevins calls the “Keelerganzias,” novels of elephantine proportion, running to hundreds of pages and dozens of plots. The best example of these is The Amazing Web (1929), which many critics consider to be Keeler’s masterpiece. In this blockbuster, the “webwork” lacing of plot and subplot—the intricate interweaving of apparently coincidental but ultimately interrelated events—is at its peak. The multilayered plot centers on a young lawyer named David Crosby and the doings of his many clients. The first of these is Lindell Trent, a young woman on trial for stealing a diamond ring; Crosby falls in love with her while pleading her case. Unfortunately, because of his weak defense, she is convicted and sent to prison. Later, she is cleared by the deathbed confession of the true culprit. Crosby hurries to the prison with this news, only to discover that she has already been freed and is on her way to Australia. While en route to Australia, however, Lindell jumps ship. Arriving on an atoll in the South Pacific, she places a note in a bottle giving her exact location and throws it out to sea. Crosby hears of this note and is determined to find her.

Meanwhile, Crosby is involved with another client, millionaire playboy Archibald Chalmers, who is accused of murdering his friend Rupert Van Slyke. Promised a yacht if successful, Crosby manages to sway the jurors; the trial ends in a hung jury. In the meantime, Al Lipke places an advertisement in the newspaper; he is looking for twelve hundred men with suitcases who are available for an hour’s work. A jewel thief and a social secretary named Annie Wentworth, who later is revealed to be Lindell, also appear in this intricately plotted novel. The bottle in the Pacific turns out to be a hoax, Chalmers is freed, and Lindell and Crosby are blissfully wed.

Characterization is papier-mâché and pasteboard. Despite her adventures, Lindell is a Victorian heroine, pure and unsullied and worshiped unconditionally by Crosby. Chalmers and Van Slyke are one-dimensional stereotypes. One memorable character is Isadore Katzenberger, a Yiddish comic figure who appears as a witness in a minor scene. His dialect is so contrived that its presence enlivens the novel. Yet the imaginative leaps are so great, the humor so marked, that the reader feels he is in the presence of the Marx Brothers or the slapstick of Mack Sennett. This may well be the benchmark of Keeler’s talent: his nutty and improbable technique that makes his audience roar with laughter.

The Matilda Hunter Murder

In 1931, Keeler introduced Tuddleton Trotter in The Matilda Hunter Murder. Although Trotter is often thought of as a recurring figure in the Keeler canon, he actually appears in only two of the novels: the word-packed “webwork” narrative The Matilda Hunter Murder and one of the last “Spanish novels,” The Case of the Barking Clock (1947). Nevertheless, Trotter remains one of Keeler’s most memorable creations.

The Matilda Hunter Murder concerns another Keeler innocent with love and money problems, Jeremy Evans. He follows his love into a web of intrigue involving a lethal Z-ray machine; several dead bodies, including that of an inventor; a platinum brick; espionage; arson; and numerous other villainies. This high melodrama is tempered by the occasional appearances of Yiddish, blackface, and Germanic dialecticians whose hilarious accents delight the reader. Despite the complexity of this coil of events, however, Trotter rights all ills and solves all crimes with ease and justice. As does The Amazing Web, The Matilda Hunter Murder uses all the stylistic devices that have become Keeler hallmarks, including his use of outlandish surnames; his almost surreal images; and his neologisms, spoonerisms, puns, and fantastic diction. Yet with his excesses, Keeler is burlesquing conventional detective fiction, as the reader eventually realizes.

The Vanishing Gold Truck

The other series protagonist of Keeler’s repertory is Angus MacWhorter, the owner of the Biggest Little Circus on Earth. He first appears in The Vanishing Gold Truck (1941). A tall, outlandishly attired figure, he spends most of his time trying to avoid having his beloved circus snatched away by grotesque scoundrels. The Vanishing Gold Truck records his adventures as he travels through the American Bible Belt, where a series of religious “crazies” are intent on banning or acquiring his “pagan” circus.

The Circus Stealers and The Case of the Crazy Corpse

In The Circus Stealers (1956), the MacWhorter circus continues through the Bible Belt, following Old Twistibus, a winding road that leads through swamps, “dead man’s” lands, and towns dominated by crazed religious preachers. The Case of the Crazy Corpse (1953), another MacWhorter novel, turns on still another attempt to wrest his circus away from him; it involves a nude corpse that is revealed to be made up of two halves: one Asian, the other black.

Keeler’s Later Novels

In his last novels, Keeler’s manner and content became more, rather than less, bizarre as he was writing solely for his Spanish and Portuguese audiences. He also continued to write his gargantuan works, such as The Case of the Jeweled Ragpicker (1948), from which he finally culled four separate novels. Francis M. Nevins has observed that his last works were the wildest of the utterly wild repertory of the old maestro.

Critics have found it difficult to categorize Keeler’s brand of mystery fiction or to assess it in the context of the genre—partly because his reputation has dimmed so rapidly that some of his novels are hard to obtain. Nevins, responding to Keeler’s unique zaniness, has called him “the sublime nutty genius of crime fiction” and a man “so far ahead of his time we have still not caught up with him.” Although not all critics might take as unqualified a stand, most agree that Keeler’s The Amazing Web is an amazing tour de force, a “great murder mystery,” which, as Will Culpy put it, “has to be read to be believed.”

It cannot be said with any finality that Keeler’s style, his personae, or his plotting in any manner influenced the detective writers who followed him. Nor can it be said that his antiheroic major characters in some way foretold such rumpled and comic figures as Inspector Jacques Clouseau (protagonist of The Pink Panther, 1964). Nevertheless, like such anticonventional figures as Ken Kesey’s Randle Patrick McMurphy, Keeler’s disheveled characters are part of the American literary tradition of the outsider who criticizes society’s flaws and ills.

Principal Series Characters:

• Tuddleton Trotter is an aged, unkempt, scruffy figure whose wisdom and insights into human motivations and psychology mark him as more than a mere detective. Socrates-like, contemptuous of society’s exterior values, yet kind and compassionate, he merits the epithet “universal genius.” His one passion is cats; a patron of the homeless felines, he loves them deeply and unconditionally.
• Angus MacWhorter , the proprietor of MacWhorter’s Mammoth Motorized Shows, the Biggest Little Circus on Earth. A rumpled antihero detective, he travels with his circus, unruffled by the crazy events that swirl about him. When an event of mysterious dimension occurs, however, he is able, through his “inspired lunacy,” to unravel it.

Bibliography

Fadiman, Clifton. Introduction to Fantasia Mathematica: Being a Set of Stories, Together with a Group of Oddments and Diversions, All Drawn from the Universe of Mathematics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958. Discusses Keeler’s short story, “John Jones’s Dollar.”

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. “The Wild and Woolly World of Harry Stephen Keeler.” Journal of Popular Culture 3-5, 7 (Spring, 1970-Summer, 1973): 635-643, 410-418, 521-529, 159-171. Multipart study of Keeler’s extremely complex plots and the worlds that they generate.

Polt, Richard, and Fender Tuckers, eds. Wild About Harry. Shreveport, La.: Ramble House, 2003. More than twenty-five reviews of Keeler’s books from Keeler News, the newsletter of the Harry Stephen Keeler society.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. This overview of detective fiction written in English focuses on the relationship between literary representations of private detectives and the cultures that produce those representations. Sheds light on Keeler’s work.

Tucker, Fender, ed. A to Izzard: A Harry Stephen Keeler Companion. Shreveport, La.: Ramble House, 2002. Contains many reviews and essays on Keeler, some of his writings, a complete bibliography of his works, and sample jacket covers.