Sing Sing Nights (1934), by Lewis D. Collins

I hope I haven't Harry Stephen Keeler'd you to death, yet. It is very easy for him and his presence to kill people--so tremendous is his bibliography, and so imposing is his prose, that cardiac arrest is usually an inevitability when trying to plow through even just one of his novels. Sure enough, there is another Keeler book on the line for the Book Club of Desolation: his ostensible magnum opus, a four-book saga called The Skull in the Box. But the next entry (or next two) will concern some non-Keeler books. After all, variety is the spice of life.

I have discovered another of these life-spices. They are incarnate in a simple fact, and in the subject of that fact. There is a Harry Stephen Keeler movie, and that is our subject--and the movie is awesome, which is the fact. Yes, it's incredible to believe, but this movie manages to preserve Keeler's idiosyncrasies onscreen, though these are translated into equally-bizarre turns of strangeness. Sing Sing Nights, based off the novel of the same name (and one of the many Keelers I haven't yet read), serves as a way to initiate people into the ways of Keeler that is not so extreme as to kill their brain immediately. And for fans of his work in any capacity, it is a treat that is offered nowhere else.

Wealthy douchebag Floyd Cooper is shot by three different men but because each of their shots would have struck a vital part of the body, only one of them--the one who fired the first shot--can be considered the murderer. In order to determine which one of them did it, Professor Varney, who cuts out paper dolls like a goddamn serial killer, uses a special kind of lie director to read the character of the men, by having them explain why they wanted to kill him. As the subsequent flashbacks reveal, Cooper was fond of ruining people's lives and stealing their significant others. All of them had equal cause to kill him, and the answer, of course, is reliant entirely on facts that the story has never seen fit to reveal before. Throughout this entire journey, we have scenes that go on for far too long, scenes that are cut far too short, an actual real-life monocle pop, and the jarring sudden appearance of "the warlord, Chung Fu." Thankfully, in the case of the latter, we are spared the brunt of Keeler's racial wrath, though it would reappear in another form as we'll see.

The first thing that clued me into how this movie worked was the scene at the beginning where the cops are talking at each other at the crime scene. While I've seen my share of Golden Age actors who maybe squared their jaws a bit too much, and, similarly, a solid share of some of the most wooden of B&W potboiler shmoes, the line delivery between these "characters" is so robotic you gotta wear a diving helmet and gorilla suit. They belt their lines out like jocks in a high school theatre class. But all throughout, there are moments that define the characters as human, albeit heavily disguised. Line flubs, weird improvisations, and bizarre faces help us buy that this is happening in real life. Even though there's no chance in Hell it could've. It is this opening scene, and the stiffness that populates it, that showed me that this was a true HSK film, even before the absurdly convoluted plot kicked. It is the only one of its kind in this regard.

But I should say that Sing Sing Nights is not the only movie bearing Keeler's name on the credits. Weirdly, Monogram chose to film Sing Sing Nights not once but twice--in the same year, no less. One of the stories told in Sing Sing Nights, featuring Keeler's ever-offensive depiction of Chinese people, was adapted into the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Mysterious Mr. Wong, featuring Lugosi in yellowface (!) in an extremely slow and generic butchering of the Keeler kraziness. Only thing entertaining about that movie is that Lugosi's Mr. Wong is clearly an inhabitant of Beijing's Hungarian neighborhood, as he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he's Bela fucking Lugosi and doesn't sound or look Asian at all. It is a painful watch, not only in its tedium and reliance on tropes decades old at its time of release, but also because it is one of the oldies that is searingly racist. There is a casualness to the way the stereotypical Irish cop drops slurs everywhere and says that all Chinese people are a bunch of lousy crooks. Sure, he's played off as an idiot, but it's in a "lovable" sort of way, that ends up being insulting to both Irish and Chinese people. Consider it Sing Sing Nights' evil twin, or a bonus feature on the DVD that Sing Sing never got. (Mysterious Mr. Wong got a DVD, though--which doesn't include Sing Sing as a special feature!)

To conclude: despite some flaws, Sing Sing Nights would be excellent even if it didn't contain a scene of one of the heroes calling his girlfriend "thoroughbred." Watch out for some dodgy race issues, and beware the occasional boredom (even if it does run less than an hour), but otherwise, this is a record showing the extent of human potential. People said that Watchmen was impossible to film (and it wasn't, at least with any degree of quality), but I argue that a Keeler book would be even harder. Lewis D. Collins did it. And he may not be alone--a film based on Keeler's short story "The Flyer Hold-Up" has been announced, with the attached cast consisting of Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner. The former's appearances range from Highlander II: The Quickening to Candyman to The Haunting in Connecticut. Gallner was also in Haunting but was much less fortunate, having also been in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and American Sniper. Whatever. I wish 'em the best of luck, and I certainly hope this isn't some shitty self-aware comedy nonsense.

Sorry, I digress all too frequently. Sing Sing Nights. Good. Watch it.

Book Club of Desolation #5: The Scarlet Mummy (1965), by Harry Stephen Keeler and Tertza Rinaldo Keeler

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

Book Club of Desolation #1: The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934), by Harry Stephen Keeler

I'm very excited to introduce a new column here on Adam Mudman's A-List. I've long wondered if there was ever a literary parallel to the trash cinema that I've dedicated so much of my life to, and only recently have I started to construct a picture of such a thing. This picture was always there, waiting to be dug up, and it's here where I have to say that the new column, of which today's post is the first, is based in large part on the shoulders of previous giants. I would like to start my thanks with one aimed at Ramble House for collecting various and sundry bits of crazy lit back into light--reprinting the works of Ron Haydock and Jim Harmon, Richard E. Goddard and Harry Stephen Keeler, who all disturbed and distorted the function of the novel and the English language. In regards to Keeler, I would like to thank the Harry Stephen Keeler Society for their work on documenting the life of today's writer (who of course I'll get to in a bit), and thus bettering the world in any number of ways. And finally, I would like to give a shoutout to OR Books for their release of Blood Spatters Quickly, a collection of the short stories of Ed Wood. (That Ed Wood. Of course.) I'm sure I have met and will yet meet many other people who will lead me to the sort of wonderful convention-defying literature akin to that which we explore today. Now, the Book Club of Desolation is in session, and in its moldy room in the old haunted library, the weirdest of the weird will be perused. And brought into the sunlight.

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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Image Source: Amazon