REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:         


HARRY STEPHEN KEELER, with Hazel Goodwin Keeler – The Case of the Barking Clock. Phoenix Press, hardcover, 1947. Ward Lock, UK, hardcover, 1951, as The Barking Clock. (The British edition is 5-8000 words longer than the U.S.) No paperback edition.

Barking Clock

   One book I read recently is The Case of the Barking Clock, by Harry Stephen Keeler. Though late in the Keeler oeuvre, this has all the elements that make HSK the Master of Alternative Classic Mystery: colorful characters with Dickensian names (Nyland Finfrock, Umphrey Ibstone, and Tuttleton T. Trotter to name but a few), a convoluted plot, driven by wild coincidence (at one point, in a very minor element, a letter addressed to Trotter at “Occupant, Hotel so-and-so” is mistakenly delivered to a Mr. Occpunt residing at the same Hotel!), lengthy letters and speeches of pure explication:

    “Cripes!” he said, still unbelievingly, “Cripes,” he repeated, “A guy what knows sci’nce an’ mat’matics! An’ ev’dently knows ‘em all the way from A to Izzardy and back ag’in. An’s gotta have one case what can be showed on a book jacket as — as a knockout! the one guy in the whole world who-who might an’lyze my strange case. My case what’s not only sci’ntific, but what’s got ten book jackets in it — if I know an’thing at ail o’ what that book jacket artist, Waxworth Goforth, teached me long ago when I was his errand boy.”

   and the florid metaphor:

    “. . .silk-upholstered, bulging where the upholstery was as obscene as the breasts of virgins confined in $1.98 dresses. . .”

   that make Keeler’s writing so uniquely his own.

   Barking Clock was published by Phoenix Press, the fabled firm described so vividly in Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek, and it has all the earmarks of hasty printing and sloppy proof-reading one would expect from an outfit like Phoenix — the kind distressingly common today, where the words have simply been scanned for correctness, not read for sense — but it contains one of those privileged passages that make Keeler singularly enjoyable.

      On Page 188, Joe the Duck tells Tuttleton T. Trotter about Svenda Ulf, a platinum blonde Swede who dyes her hair black and pretends to be a Russian named Olga Russakov. Svenda/Olga plays no role at all in the book, except for this brief mention. She’s not a red-herring, witness, or even a bit-player. Her presence in this single sentence of the book was apparently written in by Keeler simply as another bit of pleasantly gratuitous ornamentation in his baroque tapestry.

   That a writer as obscure as HSK, working for a cheap-jack outfit like Phoenix would take the time to throw in a touch like this is one of the wonders that keep me reading.

Editorial Comment:   Mike Nevins talks a bit of the publishing history behind this book in one of his monthly columns for this blog.