It seems ludicrous to discuss Harry Stephen Keeler as a deep, metaphysical author on the order of Kafka or Genet. In fact, it is ludicrous, and I’m not going to attempt it. I just want to point out that for a writer generally dismissed, even by his admirers, as “wacky,” he touches on some complex and unsettling themes.

   I think the salient point of Keeler’s writing is its intensely Dickensian quality. His work on characters like Xenious Jones, Christopher Thorne, Casimir Jech and Simon Grund of the Lincoln School for the Feeble Minded, irresistibly reminds one of the imagination and care that Dickens put into Uriah Heep, Fagin, Macawber et al. Nor should one overlook Dickens’ penchant for tangled interrelationships and the occasion wild coincidence.

   Having made that point, I think it best forgotten. Keeler’s love (one might almost call it a fetish) for these elements, though it constitutes much of the charm of his work, has been entirely too much the focus of his admirers and detractors.

   Without denying this considerable charm, I’d like to consider some of the less apparent underpinnings of some of his books.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Mysterious Mr. I. Dutton, hardcover, 1938.

   The eponymous narrator of The Mysterious Mr. I guides the book through something that is not so much a plot as a series of short stories. Or maybe they’re fragments of novels, since each seems to have started long before his intrusion into it. We first meet him on a Chicago street corner, holding a skull under his arm. We follow him through an odd procession of introductions in which he meets total strangers, convinces them that they are acquainted with him, and causes six suicides simply by telling some of the strangers what he knows about their guilty pasts.

   Wacky, yes, but grim. Like a Max Fliescher Cartoon. Throughout the book, there is something that could be called a plot, about the search for an escaped maniac and a scheme to defraud “I” of a fortune that he doesn’t have. Keeler pretty much ignores it, and, in fact leaves it unresolved at the end, along with I’s true identity.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Chameleon. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1939.

   The Chameleon continues the story in a somewhat lighter vein. No deaths this time, just a dizzying succession of identity-changes that make one wonder at the complexity of Keeler’s imagination and the strength of his sheer gall in the face of so many improbabilities.

   The fascinating thing about this multiplicity of identities is that although the narrative stays firmly in the first person, the narrator remains tantalizingly concealed from the reader. His constant assertions of new identities — besides pushing the plot along — says something about the nature of Identity itself.

   If an apparent amnesiac can bring total strangers to take their own lives simply by pretending to know them too well, then Identity and the knowledge of it assume a mystic power. In fact, there are religions that hold that one’s true name is sacred, that knowledge of it gives the knower power over the named. One could find significance, then, in the fact that I’s lack of identity makes him all-powerful and when he does assume a final name, it makes him impotent.

   Hmmm. That’s heavy stuff for a wacky writer, and I think I should put in here that this is not the sort of thing that one should read Keeler in search of. I just find its presence wonderful in a contrived thriller.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Defrauded Yeggman. E. P. Dutton, hardcover,

   The Defrauded Yeggman is equally odd for a mystery in that it ends with a solved murder, but the solution is absolutely pointless.Nearly half the book is a framing device, setting up a situation in which three vagrants (who are not what they appear to be) are arrested for espionage and each must tell how he came to be in possession of damning evidence or be hung. Shades of Sing Sing Nights.

   The first to tell his story is the Yeggman  of the title and his tale takes up the rest of the book. For matters extraneous to his story, we are directed to a sequel, 10 Hours. The bit of incriminating evidence he is carrying is another skull. His explanation of why he is traveling with it ranges from a South American jail to Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago, to Hawaii, and finally to Texas.

   But when the book ends, Keeler has only solved a murder — that is, revealed the identities of murderer and victim. He doesn’t redress the crime or even (here) get the Yeggman out of his Kafka-esque trial.

   Keeler’s ability to generate so much smoke, raise so many questions, ring in so many absurdities, yet refuse — in the face of all the conventions of “light fiction” or fiction per se — to give his blood-and-thunder story any ending at all raises thoughts about the absurdities of life and death that…. Well, I almost said that they evoke Sartre, but I caught myself just in time.

HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – 10 Hours. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1937.

   10 Hours, the purported sequel to Yeggman, deals more with nature of reality. At an accelerated pace, other stories told, proven, disproven, and partly re-proven. Alternate realities seem to flash by like cards flipping through a deck. At tale’s end (WARNING: ENDING ABOUT TO BE HINTED AT) not only is the trial itself proved to be unreal, but the final unmasking of the three vagrants reveals — very suitably, I think, palpable pseudonyms. (END OF WARNING: THOSE WHO READ KEELER FOR THE SAKE OF THE MYSTERY CAN NOW SAFELY RESUME READING)

   Every Science-Fiction author who ever wrote an “alternate world”. including Philip K. Dick, who seems to have won his struggle with reality, could pick up some thoughts on what is and what ain’t in 10 Hours.

   I’ll end by reiterating what I’ve already iterated: Philosophic contemplations of reality, identity, and the Meaning of Life are not what one reads Keeler for. The man cannot be pigeonholed as a mere philosopher. He created a universe all his own and that he created a metaphysics to go with it is incidental. But I can’t help thinking that just calling him “wacky” is an equally confining pigeonhole. Like a lot of good, comedy and Drama, Keeler s books can also evoke some deeper questions and respond with some darker thoughts.

E. C. TUBB – Derai. Dumarest #2, Ace Double H-77; paperback original. 1st printing, September 1968. Cover artist: Jeff Jones. Published back-to-back with The Singing Stones, by Juanita Coulson (reviewed here).

   Dumarest is a wanderer, looking for legends of lost Earth. [This is the second in a series of his adventures.] In this one he takes on the job of returning the strange young girl named Derai to her home planet of Hive, not knowing she has telepathic powers that will involve him in a struggle for control of the planet,

   More importantly, however, is the the interest that the cybernetic brain Cyclan has in the girl, leading to a deadly competition in the mazes of Folgone, and to Derai’s death.

   These are interesting worlds, well described, with all the perversions, customs, and other necessities of life these worlds entail. Tubb displays an ability to write between the lines: or is he just unable to explain everything well? It does come off quite effectively.

Rating: ***½

JUANITA COULSON – The Singing Stones. Ace Double H-77; paperback original; 1st printing, 1968. Cover art by Kelly Freas. Published back-to-back with Derai, by E. C. Tubb (a review of which will be posted here soon).

   Strange stones that entrance those who touch them with their mysterious essence of music appear on the black market, and Geoff Latimer is sent by the Federation to the protected planet of Pa-Liina to discover their source. Also part of his assignment is the task of stopping slave trade carried on through “protecting” planet of Deliyas. To be done, of course, without requiring official intervention.

   A mutated goddess has developed the stones for the benefit of her fellow Pa-liinians, and Geoff must decide which side he will back in the struggle for rule of the planet.

   Things are not made clear at once, in a decidedly casual approach to the plot, but everything does finally get explained. Latimer works like the CIA is supposed to. He doesn’t much like it, but in this case, his manipulations work out fine. A strange way of doing business, after all that time.

Rating: ***½

TRANSATLANTIC. Fox Films, 1931. Edmund Lowe, Lois Moran, John Halliday, Greta Nissen, Myrna Loy, Jean Hersholt. Director: William K. Howard

   Just lately I’ve been catching up to a lot of films I’ve wanted to see — or see again — for quite some time, films lost or just unavailable for a generation or more. First and best of the bunch is Transatlantic,   which I’ve been keen to watch ever since I saw a still from it in a book on Hollywood Cameramen thirty years ago.

   Made at the dawn (or early morning anyway) of talking pictures, Transatlantic defies every notion you ever had about early talkies; it’s a fast-paced, highly visual thriller, set on a luxury liner with a clever story (by Guy Standing, whose credits include the book for Anything Goes) centered around Edmond Lowe as a shady character fleeing the law, mingling aboard ship with con men, kept women, and the loyal trophy wife (Myrna Loy, back when she usually played oriental temptresses) of a nearly murdered millionaire — who apparently ran a bit of a con himself.

   Director William K. Howard and photographer James Wong Howe take this snappy mystery and serve it up with splendid sets that give the huge ship the appearance of a Byzantine palace or gothic cathedral, jazzed up with snappy editing and a restless, roving camera that follows the action perfectly. All capped off very effectively by a tour-de-force cat-and-mouse shoot-out in the labyrinthine guts of the ship itself.

   Simply dazzling. Not a well-known film, but one I can recommend highly.

KEN FOLLETT – Eye of the Needle.  Arbor House, US, hardcover, 1978. Signet, US, paperback, 1979. First published in the UK as Macdonald and James, London, 1978, as Storm Island. Reprinted many times since. Film: United Artists, 1981, with Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan.

   Eye of the Needle is one of the best of the recent spate of World War II espionage novels. Ken Follett combines a very believable plot based on astounding. historical fact with excellent pacing and-a real boon in this type of thriller-well-rounded. sympathetic characters.

   The historical fact is that in 1944 the Allies created a fake army in southeastern England. To Nazi reconnaissance planes. it looked like a huge encampment set to invade France at Calais. But seen from the ground, the “barracks” had only one side and a roof; the “airplanes” were mere carcasses sunk into the ground. with no engines or wheels. It was a hoax of gigantic proportions that convinced the Nazis to concentrate their defenses at Calais instead of Normandy, and it affected the outcome of the war.

   But this outcome would have been very different had there been one German spy who saw the phony encampment al ground level and reported it to Berlin. Suppose there had been such a spy. a master spy, an upper-class German, somewhat of a rebel, who refused to join the Nazi party but still had the ear of Hitler. Suppose such a spy had lived in London long enough to pass as an Englishman ….

   This is the central premise of Eye of the Needle. Here Follett gives us Die Nadel — the Needle — who uses a stiletto to kill anyone who threatens his mission or his cover. He kills as a soldier; he doesn’t enjoy it. In a moment of self-inquiry. he wonders if his personality — the ever-present wariness that keeps him at a distance from everyone else — has really not been foisted upon him by his occupation, as he likes to suppose; perhaps, he thinks, he has instead chosen his profession because it is the only type of work that can make him appear normal, even to himself.

   Such self-doubt (although it is a luxury the Needle rarely permits himself) has us at least nominally on his side for much (but not all) of the novel, even as the British agents — a typically tweedy ex-professor named Godliman and a former Scotland Yard man named Bloggs — match him in intelligence and quickly realize he has discovered their great hoax.

   With this discovery, the chase becomes faster and more desperate. Circumstances lead Die Nadel to a storm-battered island in the North Sea, where a frustrated young woman, Lucy Rose, and her wheelchair-bound husband (he lost both of his legs in a traffic accident) live in bitter isolation and where much of the novel’s action takes place.

   Lucy’s attraction to the Needle, her fear and revulsion when she finds out what he is, and finally her desperate struggle to keep from becoming his latest victim make for some the best edge-of-the-chair suspense writing of the past decade. (The 1981 film version starring Donald Sutherland and Kate Nelligan has its moments but unfortunately falls far short of the novel.)

   Follett’s success with Eye of the Needle led to a number of other best sellers, none of which has the same raw powe1 and tension. Those other thrillers include Triple (1979), The Key to Rebecca (1980), The Man from St. Petersburg (1982), and On the Wings of Eagles (1983).

     ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
   

CALCUTTA. Paramount Pictures, 1946. Alan Ladd, Gail Russell, William Bendix, June Duprez. Directed by John Farrow.

   While definitely not one of the better known films Alan Ladd ever starred in, Calcutta (1946) definitely punches above its weight and is well worth a look. Similar to the other exotic location films Ladd starred in throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Ladd portrays an adventurer who is caught up in a whirlwind of crime and intrigue.

   When Neale Gordon (Ladd), a commercial pilot in post-WW2 India, learns that his colleague and friend Bill Cunningham was strangled in a Calcutta back alley, he becomes determined to solve the case on his own. Along for the ride is fellow pilot Pedro Blake (William Bendix).

   The main problem that Gordon encounters is that everyone he meets could potentially be a suspect, including the lovely Virginia Moore (Gail Russell), Cunningham’s fiancee. And that is what makes Calcutta work. There are layers upon layers of intrigue, suspicious characters with ulterior motives, and men and women with dubious intentions. The film captures the mood of post-WW2 Asia very well. The Japanese have been defeated, but what comes next?

   In some ways, Calcutta reminded me of The Maltese Falcon (1941). No, it’s not nearly as good a film and Ladd isn’t Bogart. But there’s a similarity in the sense that, at some point, the labyrinthian plot doesn’t matter as much as the characters and the atmosphere. That’s definitely true for this John Farrow-directed feature.