It’s been a year since the first of these little excursions into the savage wasteland of Books So Bad They’re Good.
Well…not really. The first diary was published on February 23rd and tonight is February 25th, so it’s actually a year and two days. I’m writing this introduction on the actual anniversary, though, so this is the Official First Anniversary of Books So Bad They’re Good, at least to me, and since I’m the one who risks my sanity researching and writing these diaries who’s produced most of the diaries in this series, I get dibs on choosing the official anniversary date.
So, happy anniversary to Books So Bad They’re Good! And a huge BSBTG thank you to Limelight, who asked me to write this series in the first place, Quarkstomper for filling in with a splendid entry on mythopoeism, Youffraita and RiaD for letting me republish on Firefly Dreaming, and of course all of you who’ve been willing to accompany me down the untracked wilds of the Umbobo River, armed only with an assegai on this exploration of the most hilariously awful books imaginable. Without all of you, this series wouldn’t exist, and most of you would never have heard of Pedro Carolino, I, Libertine, or Morris Klaw, the Dream Detective, and wouldn’t your Saturday nights be just a little bit less exciting without those authors and their masterpieces?
In honor of this momentous occasion, tonight we’re going to discuss someone truly special. This amazing man, author of over fifty books that could almost be precursors to the works of such luminaries as Thomas Pynchon and the deconstructionists, is the living, breathing original of Ignatius Reilly and Kilgore Trout, a man whose works are even weirder than those of Phillip K. Dick after he went completely insane had the religious experience he called VALIS…and though I could easily have included his work in a diary on lousy genre books, let’s just say that Books So Bad They’re Good would be forever diminished if I didn’t devote a night exclusively to this magnificent talent.
First, though, here’s a foretaste of what’s in store for the next two months:
- March 3 – Undeserving prize winners.
- March 10 – unusual love stories.
- March 17 – pulp fiction that makes one glad that the pulps folded.
- March 24 – Marie Corelli
- March 31 – bad criticism
- April 7 – Southern-fried Gothics
- April 14 – reincarnated mediocrities
- April 21 – Horatio Alger
- April 28 – “autobiographies” of sports figures.
So keep watching this space, true believers, and don’t blame me for any yaws, boils, infections, Black Plague, weeping sores, erections lasting more than four hours, muscle pain, uncontrollable diarrhea, hallucinations of little dancing pink elephants, screaming meemies, and tuberculosis resulting from reading these diaries. You have been warned.
Now, the above warning may be superfluous when it comes to my little list; after all, WarrenS suggested Horatio Alger a few months ago, so it’s not as if you didn’t know that a diary eviscerating the legendary Unitarian minister, pulp author, and lover of young and lissome boys was in the works. The same cannot be said for tonight’s author. The faint of heart are advised to turn back now, before encountering prose of such incredibly low quality that the author was accused more than once of being insane.
You think I jest? Check out this dialogue from The Steeltown Strangler:
"Now, local-colourist, we can eat up-town at an air-cooler place--rather half-way de luxe, too, for a town like this--or we can eat at a joint outside the gates where a hundred sweat-encrusted mill-workers, every one with a peeled garlic bean laid alongside his plate, will inhale soup like the roar of forty Niagras, and crunch victuals like a half-hundred concrete mixers all running at once. Which--for you?"
Lest you think this is but an anomaly, an out of context quote from an otherwise competent writer, consider this passage from another work of this master stylist:
Redwayne TerVyne, known to the Chinese of America, because of his passion for Chinese items in his nationally syndicated column, as "The Great White Prynose," and to New York in general as "The Keyhole," hopped out of his luxurious $10,000 purple car in front of the row of de luxe art shops on Fifth Avenue.
And for those seeking proof that the third time isn’t the charm, from this author's best known work,
The Riddle of the Traveling Skull:
Either as a detective I was a good sofa-pillow crocheter, or else I was playing in the identical luck of the piccolo player when the eccentric millionaire filled up the instruments of each member of the German band with $5 gold pieces.
Yea and verily, the man who wrote these words, and many more (so many, many,
many more), was more than just bad. He was a true American original, a Gargantua of Garbage, a Murasaki of Mediocrity, an author who bestrode the ranks of Authors So Bad They’re Good like unto a latter-day Colossus of
Crap Rhodes. “I damn near busted my cerebellum making them up,” he once wrote about his own books, and anyone who reads them will be hard pressed to say otherwise.
Ladies and gentlebeings, bad book lovers of all ages, I give you the one, the only, the immortal:
Harry Stephen Keeler.
Harry Stephen Keeler was born in Chicago in 1890. His mother, who was widowed several times, kept body and soul together by running a boarding house catering to theater people, which may account for her son's love of the eccentric, the flamboyant, and the just plain peculiar. That these words, especially "eccentric" and "peculiar," may have applied to the young Keeler himself can be gleaned from his mother having him committed to an insane asylum at an early age. The one diagnosis we have, of "radiculitis," is not a mental condition, however, so the true reason for the committal remains obscure.
Regardless of why he ended up in the asylum, Keeler was out by the age of 22 and working in a steel mill as an electrician. About the same time he began writing and selling stories to the pulps, some of which featured characters involuntarily committed to insane asylums. Soon he was selling consistently enough that he quit his day job so he could write full time, and soon after that he was offered the editorship of 10-Story Book, one of the hundreds of pulp magazines that entertained Americans in the days before television and corporate publishing destroyed the short fiction markets.
Among his earliest stories was a primitive (in all senses of the word) piece of science fiction called "John Jones's Dollar." Originally published in Black Cat around the time of the Great War, it tells the story of how a single dollar led to the triumph of Socialism thanks to the wonders of compound interest:
"Well, this Mr. J664M42721Male, the thirty-ninth descendant of the
original John Jones, had a lover's quarrel with Miss T246M42652Female,
which immediately destroyed the probability of their marriage. Neither
gave in to the other. Neither ever married. And when Mr. J664M42721Male
died in 2946 A.D., of a broken heart, as it was claimed, he was single
and childless.
"As a result, there was no one to turn the Solar System over to. Immediately, the Interplanetary Government stepped in and took possession of it. At that instant, of course, private property ceased. In the twinkling of an eye almost, we reached the true socialistic and democratic condition for which man had futilely hoped throughout the ages.
"That is all today, gentlemen. Class is dismissed."
One by one, the faces faded from the Visaphone.
For a moment, the professor stood ruminating.
"A wonderful man, that old socialist, John Jones the first," he said softly to himself, "a farseeing man, a bright man, considering that he lived in such a dark era as the twentieth century. But how nearly his well-contrived scheme went wrong. Suppose that fortieth descendant had been born?"
In addition to politics and pulp fiction, Keeler found the love of his life during this heady period.
Hazel Goodwin was also a pulp writer, mainly of light romance and contemporary fiction, and aside from one rough patch involving his secretary Thelma Rinaldo (see below), Keeler adored both her and her writing from their marriage in 1919 to her death in 1960. They collaborated both personally and professionally, co-writing several mystery novels and using each other's characters and settings whenever they wished. Harry in particular enjoyed Hazel's circus love story "Spangles" so much that he used its characters and settings for a series of novels involving MacWhorter's Mammoth Motorized Shows, even though at one point poor Angus MacWhorter seems to have been stripped of his mammoth motorized show in favor of a more modern lifestyle:
And Angus MacWhorter, left alone with his colourless ascetic furniture, and his diorama, stroked his chin in helpless futility.
Harry also had the habit of taking whole short stories, either by himself or Hazel, and plunking them in the middle of his detective novels whenever a character was hankering for something to read. Weirdly enough, every single one of these stories, no matter how encountered, always figured in the solution to the mystery that allegedly lay at the heart of the book. Isn't that amazing?
Well...
Not really. Keeler's initial work may have been conventionally clunky, but soon he developed a unique method of outlining that he called a webwork plot. Fortunately for posterity he laid out the technique in detail in a 1927 article called "The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction". In its purest form, a webwork plot includes at least four separate subplots that intersect in seemingly unrelated and coincidental ways, at least until a final revelation (sometimes in the last paragraph or even the last line) makes everything clear. This may require the author to drop main characters halfway through a book, introduce a protagonist two chapters from the end, give the long arm of coincidence a workout that makes the average bodybuilder's pumping iron look sad indeed, or go off on long, rambling discourses about everything from racetrack betting to Chinese jade carvers. Ridiculous the results may be, but since the last thing a webwork novel cares about is realism, why not?
To help him come up with the strands in his webwork novels, Keeler acquired a huge private morgue of newspaper clippings, the weirder the better. Whenever it was time to write a new book, he would select a few dozen clippings at random, put them in a hat, and pull out a handful. No matter how disparate, distant, or dismal, these stories would be the basis of his next book.
A fine example of the results can be found in The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. Just imagine what sort of clippings led to this:
For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!
Or chapter titles like this, from
The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal:
The Chromatic Whimsicalness of Avunculi Samuelis
Synthetic Mexican
"Eternal Recurrence--'Repetition Eternal'!"
The Micro-Axially Condensed Typewriter!
Perhaps the most astonishing example of the webwork plot in action is a multi-novel sequence Keeler wrote in the 1930s.
The Marceau Case (1936),
X. Jones of Scotland Yard (1936), and
The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne (1937), used newspaper clippings, photos of Keeler himself, a religious cult of people who never discard anything they find in a new home, queasily ethnic joke pamphlets called "Chinaboy Chuckles" (yes, really), a midget circus performer named Little Lucas/Guy Ezekiah/Yoko Yakamura/The Juggling Jesus/The Six Toed Polish Dwarf depending on time, place, and circumstance, a photo of a bare-breasted woman who is probably not Hazel Goodwin, diagrams, and a great deal of only vaguely comprehensible prose as Keeler works out the mystery of who killed Andre Marceau, an eccentric writer who was found dying of strangulation in the middle of his own lawn. The only clues were sightings of an auto-giro piloted either by a dwarf or a small child, small footprints on the lawn that didn't actually reach Marceau's body, an acid-dipped wire about the dead man's neck, and Marceau's last words, "The babe from hell!"
The first novel features a solution by an American detective, Alec Snide (yes, really). Alas for Snide (and no, I can't believe I just wrote that), he is proven wrong in the second novel by Xenius Jones, the pride of Scotland Yard. Jones, who bears zero resemblance to any other Scotland Yarder of fact, fiction, or imagination, eschews conventional means of investigation in favor of a "Reconstruction of the Complete Invisible Stress-Pattern in a Medium Lying in a 4-Dimensional Continuum, by Analysis of the Surrounding Rimples." This seems to involve:
....for all practical purposes, in a world of space and "time," the "wrinkles" resulting from the "crime-stress" appear, in reality, as "deviations." Deviations in human conduct: deviations from normal habit, custom, and be likened to an explosion, or concussion, the force of which radiates out in all directions--not just into the future, he cautions--but also into the past!--definitely deviating the paths and conduct not only of the chief actors--but of all those who have intimate contact with them--and who, by that very relationship, are thus displaced in 4 dimensions from the chief actors. The maximum possible "deviation" in a murder is, Jones points out, that of the murdered man--whose course is deviated, for the first time, from living to being dead!
This leads to the conclusion that Marceau wasn't murdered at all, but died of a rare (and totally fictitious) genetic disease passed down from a Marceau ancestor's brief liaison with Napoleon Bonaparte. The disease, tetanoid epilepsy, not only caused its victims to die of what appeared to be strangulation, but hallucinate in their last moments, explaining not only how Marceau died but his final ravings about a hell baby. Isn't that a dandy solution?
Alas for Xenius Jones (and no, I can't believe I just wrote that, either), both he and Alec Snide are wrong in the third novel, when it is revealed that Andre Marceau was not murdered by enraged midgets after he wrote a letter to the newspapers advocating the extermination of all "Lilliputians" because he thought that their presence in the gene pool would lead to the human race shrinking to the point where we would be eaten by insects. Nor did he die of a genetic ailment. No, he died of something else, as detailed by Christopher Thorne...or yet another solution sussed out in the pages of 1939's Y. Cheung, Business Detective, about a young Chinese businessman who must get his name in the newspaper to inherit half his rich uncle's estate...or yet ANOTHER solution in a much later book,The Chameleon. It's as if, like MacWhorter's Mammoth Motorized Shows, Keeler loved his setting and characters so much he simply couldn't stop writing about them.
Please remember, also, that while Keeler was writing the above, he was happily churning out short stories, editing a magazine, and collaborating with Hazel on some of her magazine fiction. Clearly he was a very busy man.
One warning for those who wish to read the amazing works of Harry Stephen Keeler for themselves: his racial attitudes were, to put it mildly, problematic. Oh, he was a Socialist and a progressive, no doubt of that. One of his books, The Man Who Changed His Skin, prefigures the old Godfrey Cambridge movie Watermelon Man by transporting the soul of a snobby Boston Brahmin into the body of an ex-slave in 1855, while his 1924 Sing Sing Nights includes this ringing defense of racial equality:
"The Princess O Lyra Sing dropped her eyes to the floor for one brief second. Then she raised them and faced the reporter bravely, a barely perceptable flush mounting to her cheeks.
"My solution is a radical one-but only one," she said simply. "And I think, Mr. Jason H. Barton, that you will agree with me. What is race? It is not color-although color is always one of the visible characteristics. As to color-pigmentation-science will overcome that in less than a few hundred years. Science will make us all of one shade. But race is something deeper-far deeper-than mere color. Racial distinctions date back thousands of years; they are rooted too deep to be outweeded by professors working in laboratories. And my solution is so-so simple. It is intermarriage! Intermarriage must take place between all races of earth until so-called racial distinctions are breeded out. Then, when in a thousand or five thousand years a great homo-homo-oh, dear, what is that terrible word in English? homogeneous race shall people the earth, then shall there no longer be any race but human race. Then shall there be no race hatred-no war. You see, Mr. Jason H. Barton, so long as the desire for war may remain in hearts of men, even though war itself is made impossible, then humanity is not yet even on road to reach its-its capabilities. Race antagonism must go, you see. Hence race and pride of race must disappear!"
While many of his books feature sympathetic non-white characters, including the memorably named "Ebenezer Sitting-Down-Bear," who is half Native America, one quarter white, and one quarter African-American, or the educated, intelligent Y. Cheung in
Y. Cheung, Business Detective, far, far more feature the sort of dialogue and stereotyping that thankfully died out about the time Hollywood stopped casting Swedes as Charlie Chan. Keeler's defenders, including cultural critic Francis M. Nevins, are convinced that Keeler used his works to criticize racism and advocate for racial equality, but it's still hard to read passages like this one from
The Green Jade Hand without wincing:
"I get so scared," Li went on. "I thinkee first, Wong Kwei telegraph Chicago and say I steal um lil gleen-jade hand. Before they gettee back in kitchen, I tossee gleen-jade hand in big pan chop suey I jus' make. They say: 'Li Ling Lee, comes by station. You livee in Clevelan', didn't you?' And then I knowee sure they wantee me for steal Wong's gleen-jade hand. They takee me to station, an' I say I not knowee anything, for why I arrest."
And what about a novel narrated by an African-American in dialect like this?
Yassuh, Ah ca'ied a boxed telumscope to de 'spress comp'ny fo' de man whut usta fix 'em in dah.
At the same time, Nevins and other Keeler fans may have the right of it;
every ethnic group gets the same treatment in Keeler's works, from Germans:
Bod afder dot, Roggo, vy nod we boomp him off ride avay? Unt schnake his potty oud-d-d-d tonide bevore - ?"
to Italians:
Bot wance we catch thoz' ransome monee, Loo-ee - you no mebbe gonna try order us for to mak' beeg scatter - weeth heem knowin' 'oo we are."
to allegedly well educated WASPS:
"What on earth do you mean, Boyce? About knowing 'smart-alecky wisecracks' - and handing them out free gratis? Just because you've run your grandfather's poky, stodgy little real-estate business for 6 years, there at the 242nd Street station of the Broadway Subway - or 6 years minus your year-and-a-quarter time out while serving on that Navy coast patrol vessel - doesn't mean you can't speak - as a young man might - any longer. Real-estate men aren't supposed to be old fogies, are they? And besides, the matter has nothing whatsoever to do with your grandfather's will, so far as I see it."
A third aspect of Keeler's work that must be noted is his tendency to use names that make Charles Dickens look unimaginative. In addition to Alec Snide (I still can't believe I just wrote that), Xenius Jones, Ebenezer Sitting-Down-Bear, Princess O Lyra Sing, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel, and Little Lucas/Guy Ezekiah/Yoko Yakamura/The Juggling Jesus/The Six Toed Polish Dwarf, here are a few other Keeler names for your delectation. Just
try to imagine ordering takeout pizza or chicken vindaloo under the following:
- Criocan Mulqueeny
- Ichabod Tsung
- Mortimer Q. "Square-Shooter" King
- Scientifico Greenlimb
- Charley Squat-in-Thunderstorm
- MacAngus MacWhiffle
- Screamo the Clown
- Foxhart Cubycheck
- Mulchrone KixMiller
- Count Ritzenditzendorfer
- Who-Was-Greta-Garbo (racehorse)
- Furbelly Wavetail (cat)
- K-5555
- John Very-Bad-Man-Makes-All-White-Men-Tremble
Needless to say, this sort of literary lunacy did not survive much past World War II.
10-Story Magazine folded, Keeler's publishers dropped him, and by the 1950s the only house that would touch him was Phoenix Press, a gloriously cheesy outfit that was one step (if that) above a vanity press. By the end of his life Keeler was only being published in Spain and Portugal, at least partially because his Spanish translator was a better stylist than Keeler himself.
Even worse, his beloved Hazel died in 1960 after forty-one years of marriage. Keeler mourned for three years, during which he wrote very little, even for the Spanish market. Fortunately for him he fell in love with his former secretary, Thelma Rinaldo (remember her?), and married her in 1963, giving him four years of happiness before his death in 1967.
Keeler fell into almost complete obscurity after that, barring the occasional republication of "John Jones's Dollar" by math mavens. The sole exception was a series of articles by Francis M. Nevins in The Journal of Popular Culture that went into extensive detail about Harry Stephen Keeler, his life, and his unique contributions to American literature and the mystery genre. There Keeler might have remained, yet another forgotten pulp writer, were it not for the seemingly endless America appetite for the weird, the unusual, and the completely deranged.
This is why began as a half-mocking effort by several college students to convince Thelma Rinaldo Keeler that someone still cared about her husband's writing is now a genuine movement to bring Keeler's books to the public. Ramble House has digitized all his books, including several that were only published in Spanish and Portuguese, so the modern reader can see for herself just what the fuss is about. There have been pieces on NPR and in respected newspapers, and no less a media figure than Roger Ebert has devoted column space to the man mystery writer Bill Pronzini called "The Kracked King of Keelerland."
Best of all, someone is now tweeting @HarrySKeeler, allowing his wit, wisdom, and unique style to be shared with the entire world. Behold:
• "Cube steak so good," said the idiot blankly. "Like eat fat baby with juice."
• It was like trying to think about the square root of minus zero, or something.
• There is no paternal authority in a family where a woman is running it according to precepts laid down by quack Yogis.
• "He's not called 'Habeas Corpus Gottselig' for nothing," said Bob Landell grimly.
• Socko. Sqush. Right through the back of John's coco. He gurgles on his brew--and he's dead.
• And so--my poor son's head came forth out of the unknown--and then went, again, like--like a butterfly pausing on a mulberry leaf.
• "Guggle-oo--guggle-oo!" he choked gleefully, on his own saliva.
• And comparisons--comparisons odious!--were rearing themselves like impenetrable granite ghosts lined starkly along the fence of reason.
• My forehead was so corrugated that an Eskimo's fur coat, sprinkled with nothing but Lux, could have been washed on it.
Truly, Harry Stephen Keeler was a unique and memorable figure in American letters, worthy of far more attention from the critics than he has hitherto received. Can a posthumous biography be far behind? Films based on his works? Perhaps a volume in The Library of America?
Or maybe just a diary here at Daily Kos?
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And so, my friends...have any of you read a Keeler book? Or even heard of him before now? Should we start investing our dollars in hopes of bringing progressive values to the world at long last? Rename our pets after Screamo the Clown? Investigate the mysteries of the Micro-Axially Condensed Typewriter? The suggestion box is open, so feel free to share....
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