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| The gorgeous McSweeney's hardcover edition. |
It would be easy for me to dedicate this entire column to Harry Stephen Keeler. He is truly one of the most baffling and inspirational authors of the early/mid 20th Century, and whether you like him or not, reading his work will forever transform one's knowledge of the limitations of the mystery genre, much in the same way that works like House of Leaves transforms the way one views a book. His motifs, in their own way, have become legendary--absurd plot twists (like revealing the killer's identity to be a character we've never heard of before on the last page), bizarre dialects (which usually have to be read aloud to be comprehensible in any way), and obsessive recurring MacGuffins (circus freaks, skulls) are just a few of the things that motivate the bizarre legacy he thankfully left for us in his prolific lifespan. I have only just begun what I hope to be a long relationship with Keeler, and I have started such a bond with the most recommended first book of his, 1934's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. If even half of his material is like this, I will suddenly have an entire library worth of material for both this column and my life.
So with that briefest of intros, we reach our first conundrum--explaining the plot of Riddle is next to impossible, because it depends on impossibility to function. All the same, I'll do my best to talk about it, while also preserving the tradition of not revealing its frustrating and hilarious conclusion.
I should say beforehand, however: Keeler was a pulp writer in the '30s, and that means his racial sensibilities are not up to modern par by any stretch of the word--it is one of the most significant issues of his work. There is some debate over whether or not Keeler was genuinely racist or parodying racism. It's hard to figure out, especially in Riddle, and so let me just say that most readers will tense up any time a person of color shows up (Keeler always had a fascination with the Chinese in particular). I like the idea that Keeler was a progressive, and the shocking racism of his work is, in fact, attempt to be a parody. A parody that is no less heavy-handed than anything else in his corpus.
Clay Calthorpe is a businessman returning to his native Chicago from a trip in England, where he is pursued by a, ahem, mysterious Chinaman. Calthorpe realizes that the Asian has been following him from the train--this unsettling realization is swiftly topped when he finds out that his work bag has been switched with someone else's. And the holder of the swapped bag was using it to transport a trepanned skull, containing a green bullet and shredded fragments of a poem! Calthorpe, though shaken by the discovery, goes to visit his friend John Barr, the inventor of Barr-Bag, a model of work bag that seriously gets, like, two chapters dedicated to it in descriptions. Barr has to get throat surgery, and Keeler then spends a lot of time lingering on the use of cocaine in surgery, perhaps trying to tell us something. Calthorpe then visits his fiancee, and the revelation of the skull causes his future father-in-law, the head of a wealthy candy company, to faint, and then call off the marriage. The businessman thus has a personal stake in solving the mystery--his marriage depends on it! The subplots that spin out of this concept are endless. It involves a trail leading to "O. Ming Lee, the Spider-Woman," a circus freak with six arms and four legs (!), as well as lectures about trepanation, and the sinister machinations of Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel (!!!), called Suing Sophie due to her compulsion for suing men over breach of promise by faking that they failed to marry her after proposal. As I said, the ending does not merely suck at making sense, but it is literally physically impossible.
I could not believe the amount of plot that Keeler squeezed into the novel. I have mentioned my own complicated plots before (peers' adjective, I swear), but I could never dream of getting in as many sub-stories, coincidences, and unlikely twists as HSK did. On top of this, his prose is dreadful. By which I mean, of course, beautiful. He insists--and here I create a self-demonstrating example!--on using an over-plethora of em-dashes--creating a sequence of increasingly Wagnerian tangents and sub-tangents--using the most egregious and overripe of the prose of purplish hue. He actually really is like Lovecraft, minus the supernatural stuff, and with more fun than ol' H.P. ever had. (He even has a Mysterious Occult Book like the Necronomicon--a tome of Chinese wisdom called The Way Out.) Naturally, he is indigestible, but fortunately, plot points are repeated over and over again, to the point where you can tell what's going on, without straining yourself.
The thing is, Keeler didn't have all of this craziness appear at random. There was an almost philosophical dimension to why he did his plots the way he did. He had a famous theory about plot working called webwork theory, wherein a plot could be sketched into a complex web of connections--each intersection point between the plotlines was a coincidence in the story that bound these seemingly scattered stories into a single (ostensibly) cohesive whole. (The link goes to the theory as posited by the man himself, which admittedly is extremely hard to read, because prose--Wikipedia is a better alternative but please read that link all the same.) When I read about Keeler's webwork theory, I found a weird kinship, as a lot of my own fiction has had a tendency (hear my confession!) to cobble together multiple storylines that are bound by a central idea of significance, and with the ending being the primary pre-planned point of the story. Reading one of his novels helped me understand the process on a deeper level, and already, I have incorporated a KEELERIAN PLOT PENTAGRAM into a story of mine, as an experiment in FUN. (That is to say I drew a pentagram and came up with a subplot for each intersection, and expanded from there.)
The thing is, Riddle seems to put a meta-statement on webwork theory into the character's reflections on life. Several times, Clay talks about how life is just a big web of coincidences that come together in shocking ways. There is a sort of divinity to this, and to me, Keeler is revealing little bit of his soul to us here. He is one of those "God moves in mysterious ways" people. Except in his universe, God is a fucking disorganized mess with no subtlety whatsoever. Keeler thus gets himself a chance to mock life by making it senseless while also being a series of orderly conspiracies by nature itself. Social, historical, or economic forces are not the ways of the secret world here--instead, everyone is the subject of a masterminded universal joke.
Of course, it's also possible that he was just over the top because the pulp standards of his era commanded him to. Those were weird times! I plan on featuring a relatively mainstream pulp on this column at some point, a 1937 piece called The Octopus, which is genuinely fitting for the site. But you can't help but sense that Keeler was different. He was more aware of his surroundings than his peers. And he mocked the hell of out of everything, all the while having the time of his life. He experimented in a time where survival was based on writing quickly, which meant formulas--these experiments are evident in webwork theory, an attempt to render writing scientific. When Keeler did resort to formulas, they were bizarre enough to satisfy every time, as they mostly involved his own internal mythos of recurring symbols.
As I said, most Keeler fans will recommend this as a first. That's because it will hook you for life--I can and will testify to that. I can't wait to look deeper. Sometime soon, I plan to check out one of the last books Keeler did before his 1967 death. He never chilled, and these last works seem to be exponential leagues ahead of the madness of Riddle.
There is one last thing that I think summarizes my experience with this book...
Near the end of this book, there is a tag that the publisher customarily put in all their mysteries, where the reader is told: "Stop! At this point--all the characters and clues have been presented to make it possible for you to determine the true identity of the blackmailer." When I read this I literally shouted "Bullshit!" and slammed the book down on the table.
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