Harry Stephen Keeler is a perfect writer for people who think their life has too little anxiety. He is the one mystery writer I've read who has so significantly made me bite my fingernails. The tension in his books is real, largely because there is absolutely no way to divine where the story will go next. While I'm finding that he recycles in-jokes, quirks, and self-created tropes without any degree of shame, his worlds are constantly populated by people whose traits are so diverse that you cannot believe they exist outside of a book. And yet, because Keeler believed that reality that unified by coincidences--a key tenet of his pseudo-philosophical idea of the webwork novel--there is a crude realism in his work that compels as much as confuses. The Scarlet Mummy appears to have been his last novel, written two years before his death, in a harsh period of his life that began in the 1950s where his sole market consisted of the Spanish and Portuguese pulp market. The book was never published in his lifetime. Given that Keeler's marginalization within the market was a result of his increasing eccentricity with age, one can assume that Mummy is his craziest work. At a hefty 400 pages, it is indeed a labyrinth, though it is remarkable how little the man altered his shtick as time went on. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
As will always be the case with Keeler's work, I will probably be unable to list every plot and subplot that haunts the book's wordy halls. There is a main thread largely involving the characters of Don Langdon and Dr. Spencer Harrow. Don, in a well-worn Keeler trend, inherits a collection of valuable items from a distant dead uncle, but he may only profit by this treasure (in this case a collection of bonds) if he fulfills an incredibly specific term. In this case, he must marry a girl with blue eyes. How unfortunate! His girlfriend's eyes are brown. However, a loophole allows him to escape this clause, even though dozens of pages are devoted to it. Yet Don's luck runs low, because the bonds are fake! He learns the story of the man who made this series of phony bonds, a genius named Lew Magner. (Any relative of Lew Kefler?) We jump away from Don's story to meet the man who turns out to be Magner himself, post-plastic surgery, the aforementioned Dr. Harrow. Harrow's plastic surgery backstory proves to be confusing as it seems he has given himself an alibi. You see, after getting out of prison, Magner hired two plastic surgeons to give him an initial altered appearance, which he used to act out the role of vagabond Brophy McShane. Then, he received a second dose of surgery to become the good doctor, so that whenever people ask him if he was once someone else and changed his appearance via plastic surgery, he can say "Yes" and tell the truth without outing himself as a crook. Plus, the plastic surgeons who were responsible for these phony identities are the brothers of Don Langdon's fiance! Are you still with me? Because this is still only about the first 70 pages of the book. From there we get five-and-a-half-year time jumps, Keelerian-typical incomprehensible accents, and of course, a flashback short story to the days of ancient Egypt dropped into the narrative by Keeler's wife.
The Scarlet Mummy is, aside from a few glances at some chapters of his books released online (mostly through Ramble House), basically my second Keeler experience. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, my first Keeler, is usually considered to be a good first course in feasting on his work. The similarities and repetitions between the two books do boggle my mind--from what I've seen and read about, it's a damn good thing Keeler chose such crazy things to write about, otherwise his tendency to write the same book over and over again would be a little draining. Like I said: my experiences are far from complete at this point. But it's all here: I've already mentioned the esoteric surgeries, the racist dialects, the conditional marriage, the soap opera love plot, the mysterious will, the superhumanly clever gangsters, the unlikely "everyman" 9-5er becoming a detective to clear his name and win the woman he loves. And, of course, the perpetually pseudo-Victorian purple prose, wherein characters stutter, stammer, pause dramatically, and interrupt themselves. There are tangentially trivia dumps everywhere that rival the intensity of the old Gardner Fox Justice League comics, and at one point a character's head is of course compared to an eternally-omnipresent skull. The same tropes, the same tricks, the same writing style, over three decades later. Isn't that great? Isn't it wonderful that for all these years this man and his wives hung onto their borderline hateful ignorance/defiance of literary traditions and conventions? Even when it cost him any sort of market he had the U.S. and the UK? I am not intending to mock here. This is pure admiration, in a "fuck the police" sort of way. My experiences in writing my novel, Tail of the Lizard King, have taught me the value of writing straightforward stories. But I still pine for experimental, middle-finger stuff like this, which makes up a lot of my unpublished stuff as well as (to a milder degree) my blog-based story Dieselworld. Keeler is a revolutionary, not a member of a simpler market as Haydock and Harmon were, but someone fighting to punch his own cracks in the face of the big leagues. Unfortunately, this results in his work becoming incomprehensible. In that sense, it's just an occasion to try to understand incomprehensibility.
Keeler also commands his audience to pay attention as they read, in a way that is much harsher than even the harshest of mystery novels. (And indeed, this is purely a mystery or crime thriller--do not expect the Mummy to come alive at any point. Sorry.) Every sentence is packed with information which will probably turn out to be vital later--though the divergences that the characters go into in their long, long conversations namedrop dozens of people, places, or things that are never mentioned again. Except when a sentence is used merely to rehash something we've read before. There are many such sentences. In fact, anywhere from 50 to 75 pages of the book could be cut entirely with nothing being lost. Except, I found myself paying just as much attention to the filler loops, because as always, the man's prose is extremely hard to follow. I kept drawing comparisons to ee cummings. Run-ons sentences, bizarre punctuation, and odd metaphors or idioms are everywhere, and so having something to clarify them is always helpful. Of course, when the question of "dialect" enters the fray, there is no explanation.
In the 1930s, Keeler seemed bound by expectations of the time to depict people of color in a racist manner. Namely, the "Negro" dialects, which sometimes come straight out of a banned Looney Tunes short, and the insistence on upholding every "Chinaman" stereotype ever. So how baffling is it that a book intended for publication in 1965 contains a long stretch where a black man seriously named "Mist' Coal" tells a story in the same dialect Keeler used for black people in the early '30s? I think I'm going to have to ditch my earlier belief that Keeler was just trying to screw around with racists--either he was seriously stuck in the past and assumed this was still acceptable (and it wasn't acceptable in the past either), or he was conscious about this stuff. I seem to recall that Keeler wrote a few books with minority protagonists--maybe this is where I should be turning my attention? Or...maybe not.
Every writer has their flaws. Charles Dickens had his narrators get too worked up about the story, Jonathan Swift ate babies, and T.S. Eliot insisted on having his work published. In Keeler's case, his likely racism is a genuine fault. But his berserk refusal to let go of his assaults on language, form, and the reader's suspension of disbelief do not work against him. This book should wash over you for its sheer audacity. Gawk as the plastic surgeon brothers tell stories of run-ins with African pygmies and drinking with Marlon Brando, which, in the span of mere sentences, expand to include a story of a Chinese herb called Ruk-Khaapa that is the perfect medicine--unless it gets wet, which causes it to erase one's memories. An element which surprisingly turns out to be really important. Like any good trash, this is a work that gets its merits from anticipating that the reader has spent their life reading mainly "good" books. By benefiting no one's taste, The Scarlet Mummy benefits the taste of most.
If anything, get it for the part where Keeler summarizes history from the time of Cleopatra up to World War II in a single (breathless) page.
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Image Source: Ramble House
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