Harry Stephen Keeler: THE BEST WORST WRITER OF ALL TIME

The Collins Library edition,
by McSweeney's

There's crappy writing and then there's crappy writing.  Likely you know what I mean.  If not, think about it this way: some of my, and likely your, very favorite movies and books are crap.  Critics like to employ the euphemism "camp" for "crap."  It's all the same to me.  Camp, as far as I'm concerned, is simply crap with a high polish (and by crap, it's generally meant that the subject is "mere" entertainment for entertainment's sake, and not meant to hold, or is otherwise devoid of ability to leave in its wake, any lasting impression or meaning or reflection of reality--you know, all the stuff that the "good" "literature" supposedly possesses in spades.

The Riddle of the Traveling Skull is exceptional camp--poop with the very highest of all possible polishes; and even going beyond the typically campy camp of my otherwise favorite "popcorn" fiction.  On one side, this book is the prototypical, skillfully wrought mystery/thriller, opaquely and gleefully noir, which qualities I love most about my favorite page-turners.  What I believe elevates The Traveling Skull, however, over the other, more typically popcorny (read either "popcorn-y" or "pop-corny;" take your pick) fluff of grocery-store trade novel paperbacks is its complete acceptance--think not the mere grudging handshake of a truce between opposing parties (and I have a sneaking suspicion that most popcorn novelists wish they were more and use their best-seller status as justification for their low-brow writing), but a mighty bear hug, brotherly, loving, and hearty--of what it is: ri-freaking-diculous and proud of it!  Characters are not based in the bland reality of museum guards or cab drivers or factory employees; they are world-traveling candy salesmen, nouveau luggage designers, and amateur brain surgeons; Bible-quoting con-men, German hypnotists, and shrinking-violets.  And they're names!  My goodness: Milo Payne, Abigail Sprigge, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel, Mrs. Winterbotham-Higginsbottom, and, my favorite, Ichabod Chang.

And this is all for one book!

Which I just finished.

And which I loved.

And which I will read again and again, like I do all my camp favorites (Preston and Child's Relic and Cabinet of Curiosities, Carr's The Alienist, and Card's Ender's Game (and yes, no matter how brilliant, EG is camp), among them).

Premise: candy salesman, Clay Calthorpe, has just returned from the Philippines, where he has just successfully contracted exclusive purchasing privilege of all the country's Julu berries, and makes his weary way home.  By mix-up of two identical, one-of-a-kind (yes) travel bags, and the flubdubbery of one well-meaning German trolley conductor, Clay comes home not with his own bagful of collars, calling cards, and clothes, but a bag carefully packed with a trephined skull, carefully stuffed with a slightly-mushroomed bullet and the carbons of some odds-and-ends poetry.  Clay recognizes, despite the hour and his fatigue, what must have happened (the residual adrenaline of a possible mugging--but false-alarm, thank-you-very-much, at least for the time being--certainly assists his faculties of deduction) and seeks contact with the clergyman, who was sitting aside him and whose bag he must have gotten by mistake.  From here, well, it all spirals out of control.

The very glee and astounding confidence with which Keeler writes renders the would-be typical mystery (well, not quite typical) into something to be savored, not ripped through in a frenzy (though you get the impression that Keeler wrote it in such fashion--frenzied, like sharks on seals).  He is an accomplished word- and sentence-smith, and injects these short strings of words with all the cockeyed imagination and flayling freedom that he does his swollen plot.  Though page-turner it was nonetheless, and I read it like I read (is this sacrilege?) Chabon and MacCarthy.  Seriously.  With Chabon, sentences are jaw-droppingly brilliant, beautiful, and rhythmically perfect; MacCarthy is stark simplicity at its naked best; Keeler's sentences, on the third face of the same coin, are indeed jaw-dropping--equally expert, held against either of these two recognized masters--but with the added bonus of being freaking hilarious!

*

My favorite moment of the book was not penned by Keeler, but his publishers.  I have a code: I will not look ahead.  Had I flipped through the novel before reading it, I'd have found this already, and it's revelation would have been much less exciting--far less satisfying.  Just before the big denouement, comes this page:

(Please excuse my thumb.)

Better still, especially considering my interest in becoming a casual expert in Keeler, was the reverse side of this very page, which left me the following note:

Consider a membership in the

Harry Stephen Keeler Society

Since its inception in 1997, the group has grown to some seventy-five members in half a dozen countries.  Its organ is Keeler News, appearing five times each year and featuring articles, letters, reviews, and a vigorous emporium of Keeler’s many books.  The News has produced fifty issues; all, back to the first, are available.  On CD-Rom ($5), the full run comes with the Keeler Dust Jacket Vault, a compendium of original artwork.  Mail payments to Richard Polt, [-----] –or consult the internet:

http://staff.xu.edu/~polt/keeler/index.html.

I wrote Mr. Polt, and am now a proud member of the HSK Society (76 members now!).  I am excited, particularly, about the Keeler News and the "Read Keeler" link, which, if you so choose, may direct you to Ramble House, which offers nearly everything Keeler ever put to paper and the public--even the stuff never available in English!

In short, get the book, read the book.  It is a seriously, hysterically good/fun, ridiculous/diverting read--no, experience.

A PERFECT SIMILE

From The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (again -- I can't help myself -- Is there no end to Keeler's brilliance?):

Context:
A character, blackmailed for murder, seeks refuge without possibility of extradition in a fictional South American country by the name of San Do Mar, with possible plans to stop briefly in New Orleans along the way to await news from his friend.  He's worried about cold feet and comments that, "Yes, I--I am in a nervous state.  I know it.  And once I'm 900 miles or so from my home town, I'll--I'll be in a worse state than ever.  I'm even likely to head back to--to Canada--instead of giving the police a chance to pull me off of some United Fruit Company liner," to which the protagonist and the man's friend, not to mention employee, Clay Calthorpe brilliant remarks:

"No.  You're done for--if you do that.  

Canada is as much a refuge for you as--as a 

Wisconsin lumber camp is for a lost virgin."


*

The Riddle of the Traveling Skull -- EXCERPT

I am deliberately reading this book slowly, because it's just such a stinking good read--ridiculous fun (and you can take that to pretty much accurately call any connotation you want: ridiculous, truly; and fun).  I don't know where I'm going to find more Keeler when this one's over, though.  This is a limited edition; all the rest are out of print!

Here, 3 tombstones from and a cabbie's description of a red-herring cemetery:

Here lies the famous

O MING LEE

The Girl with Four Legs and Six Arms

Known to the Profession

as

LEGGA, THE HUMAN SPIDER

Born Canton, China          Died Canton, Ohio

1917 - 1937

Erected by the Chinese of America

*

b. 1884 d. 1936

Here lies

GEN. TOM DOWLING

18 inches high

20 pounds in weight

Rest in peace, General!

*

ROSCOE PARKER

He brought happiness and

cheer to the world, with

a heart that, for sheer

nobleness, conformed with

his 612 pounds of weight!

B. 1885 D. 1935

“Well, it’s the cem’tery f’r circus an’ carnival people.  And been there about—I guess—four years now.”  He was turning the cab about in the width of the narrow crosswise street, but went on talking just the same.  “Far more people goes out to see the place, though, out o’ curiosity, than to see their dead ‘uns.  ‘Specially since it got wrote up in the newspaper.  They go out to read th’ cur’ous tombstones.  For they’s one or two o’ every kind o’ person buried there.  A midget or two—an’—an’ a giant, to boot!  An’ a fire-eater—he’s in the northeast corner—his tombstone says ‘If Hell There Be, He Hath No Fear of It.’  And there’s a couple o’ sword-swallowers.  One of ‘em’s grave hasn’t no stone nor nothing—but is set off, all around, with the swords he used in his act—all rusty now, o’ course.  And there’s a fat man—and a fat lady, too, somew’eres.  And the oldest tent-stake driver in the country—Jed Hopkins—forty years with Ringlings and Barnums—is in another corner.  And there’s two—no—three trapeze queens.  They don’t live long, y’ know.  They allus bust their necks!  And there’s a rubber-skinned man too.  Oh—there’s a little o’ everything in that place, I guess.” . . .  “They say,” he went on, “that half o’ th’ people in circuses and carnivals ‘d ruther be buried there than—than planted with their own folks.  In fac’, lots has been transferred there from older cem’teries.  And—but say—you didn’t know what the place was, eh?  Did—did someone hang somethin’ on you?”