Thu 5 Nov 2015
Mike Nevins on CRAIG RICE and HARRY STEPHEN KEELER
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns , Reviews[8] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
Craig Rice (1908-1957) is something of an acquired taste. She was immensely popular in her heyday, so much so that Time magazine made her the subject of a cover story back in 1946, and her reputation was still high enough more than forty years after her death that a book-length biography was written about her (Jeffrey Marks’ Who Was That Lady?).
Thanks to publishers like Rue Morgue Press, at least a few of her novels are still available today, but no one would call her a posthumous bestseller. What made her stand out among her contemporaries was the way she blended traditional whodunit elements with the kind of wacky humor one associates with Hollywood screwball comedies. In an earlier column I discussed her debut whodunit, 8 Faces at 3 (1939). This time I tackle her second.
The Marks biography doesn’t tell us whether Rice worked directly in radio before turning to novels. But she did serve for brief periods in the late Thirties as radio critic for a small midwest magazine, so it’s no surprise that the background of The Corpse Steps Out (1940) is a Chicago station. Its sensational singing star Nelle Brown, married to an ex-millionaire more than twice her age but (although Rice treats the subject discreetly) rarely without at least one lover in her own age bracket or younger, is being blackmailed by a former paramour on the basis of some, shall we say, erotic letters she wrote him.
Between the regular broadcast of her musical variety show and the re-broadcast for the west coast, she sneaks off to the man’s apartment and finds him shot to death and the letters gone. She goes back to the station and tells her press agent, Jake Justus, whom we first met in 8 Faces at 3.
Jake pays his own visit to the apartment and finds the corpse has vanished. Pretty soon Jake’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife Helene Brand and the rumpled liquor-sodden attorney John J. Malone, both also familiar from Rice’s earlier novel, are running around with Jake to find the body, save Nelle Brown’s radio career, expose the murderer, and drain Chicago of its liquor supply.
No one ranks The Corpse Steps Out among Rice’s greatest hits but it’s often bracketed with her mystery-as-screwball-comedy titles. Not by me. The body of the first of three murderees is moved around Chicago twice and that of the second once, but there’s nothing wildly humorous about these developments. I’d call the book a fairly straightforward whodunit, impossible for any reader to solve ahead of the protagonists and pockmarked by one huge coincidence: Jake and Helene are driving past a certain old warehouse when they notice it’s on fire and Jake for no good reason breaks into the building and finds the corpse he’s been looking for.
True, the proceedings are punctuated here and there by screwball dialogue. In Chapter 10 Jake settles down in the apartment he’s temporarily sharing with Helene. “I love our little home, dear….Where shall we hang up the goldfish?†In Chapter 28, as the end comes near, Malone assures Jake that “we’re leaving no turn unstoned.†To which Helene replies: “That’s wrong….[W]e’re leaving no worm unturned.â€
Genuine Hollywood screwball comedies tended to dwell on sexual innuendo but Rice keeps it to — dare I say it? — a bare minimum. About to take off on a nuptial trip with Jake, a somewhat casually attired Helene says: “I’d better get dressed, unless you don’t mind my being married in pink pajamas.†To which Jake replies: “It would save time….â€
He’s much more of an acquired taste than Rice, but my favorite among wacky mystery writers based in Chicago (or anywhere else) is Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), whom I’ve loved since my teens. Besides having the Windy City in common, Keeler and Rice shared the experience of having been institutionalized, he early in life, she later. When he was about 20, Harry’s mother for unknown reasons had him involuntarily committed for more than a year.
That period had a lasting effect on his novels. In The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro (1926) Jerry Middleton, heir to a Chicago patent-medicine fortune, is replaced by an impostor and railroaded into the state mental hospital where he’s befriended by the genuine madpersons, sweet souls one and all, and nearly killed by an assassin who‘s been hired to get admitted to the asylum and slice him up. The scene where Jerry is analyzed by that world-renowned shrink Herr Doktor Meister-Professor von Zero is probably the most hilarious lampoon of Freud ever committed to print.
About a dozen years later Keeler revisited the nuthouse theme in the novel published in two volumes as The Mysterious Mr. I (1938) and The Chameleon (1939). The nameless narrator is on a mission to collect $100,000 by returning an escaped millionaire to the loonybin before midnight. On his quest he trips blithely through close to a hundred identities, posing in turn as a tycoon, a safecracker, a locomotive engineer, a gambler, several different detectives, several authors, a couple of actors and a philosophy professor — just to name a few! — before this forerunner of The Great Impostor returns to the asylum where, as he assures us, he’ll spend the rest of his days reading British magazines and sipping Ch teau d’Yquem with his keeper.
At the end of The Corpse Steps Out, which appeared about a year after The Chameleon, Rice offers a similarly benign take on asylums:
Malone: “No, a pleasanter place.â€
Murderer: “A quiet room in a pleasant place, with a radio set perhaps….I couldn’t ask for much more.â€
Severe alcoholism and several manic-depressive and suicidal episodes led to Rice herself spending part of her last years in California’s Camarillo State Hospital and other institutions. I doubt that she found them the pleasant places she and Keeler had once conjured up. As critic William Ruehlmann has said, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover. Poor woman.
November 5th, 2015 at 3:54 pm
Never tried Craig Rice and I’m still not inclined to, but Keeler is a talent for the ages and THE MYSTERIOUS MR I is a classic of Surrealist Fiction.
November 5th, 2015 at 4:42 pm
I am a big fan of Rice and found THE CORPSE STEPS OUT funnier than you did. To me driving around with a dead body is an action of a screwball movie.
What I took most from THE CORPSE STEPS OUT was Jake and Helene were supporting cast. Rice herself would soon turn to her best character and feature him in short stories and books – John J. Malone.
The more I read Rice, the more of a fan I become her character Malone and less of her as a writer. Her mysteries seem to wander and run in circles until it finally settles on an ending. Reportedly she wrote without rewriting and it shows. You can sense when the writer is traveling aimlessly in search for the next plot point. But I still want to read all the Malone stories.
I have read only pieces of Keeler and have some of his work in my to be read file. Reading bits of him I find him an absurdist for the sake of absurdity. Writing nonsense without the strength of reality to give it any believability. I plan to read FIND THE CLOCK soon and hope to be proven wrong.
November 5th, 2015 at 9:36 pm
Rice was good here, but got much better with later Malone’s and with Stuart Palmer (doing most of the writing) penned the brilliant Withers and Malone novellas, which are first rate screwball entertainment. I am much more of a fan than this, but I agree about this one being less funny than others. Early on Rice was employing a gentler humor than later, with greater success she upped the ante. She also had ambitions to write a straight mystery novel she never got around to.
While I love screwball it hasn’t aged very well. The best writers of that school like Latimer, Bellem, Eliot Paul, and the like may be loved by fans but they seem largely forgotten now. Humor doesn’t age as well as serious fiction, maybe because so much of it is contemporary and ‘modern.’ In print it has not done as well as on screen. Wodehouse may still be read, but who reads Thorne Smith or Dornford Yates Berry books these days?
I don’t consider Keeler screwball because I don’t think he thought his work was funny or tried to write screwball. It certainly comes off as screwy, but I think he considered it to be straight mystery fiction.
I have no reason to believe we are laughing with Keeler, we are laughing at him. True screwball requires control of the material. The skill a Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Leo Rosten, or Tim Heald show at spinning a screwball mystery is beyond HSK. Keeler falls more into Bill Pronzini’s Alternative category, a cluelessly bad writer whose work is funny because of his total lack of any real talent and inability to hear how atonal and flat his ear for prose is.
Some writers did try to write screwball and end up Alternative, James O’Hanlon and Ross Spencer come to mind, but I have no reason to think Keeler was anything but serious however screwy his books are.
Funny as they are, I have an awful suspicion Keeler would be horrified that we read him as a joke and not a serious mystery novelist. Harry Stephen Keeler thought he was Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, not Soupy Sales: he thought he was penning WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD? not WHO SHOT ROGER RABBITT?
November 5th, 2015 at 11:05 pm
David, as a grammar anarchist I find Ross H. Spencer’s Chance Purdue to be brilliant and one of the best satires of PIs ever written. While I like all Spencer’s work I find all his other detectives are just rewritten weaker versions of Purdue.
Comedy like all fiction changes with generations. Prop humor of vaudeville, surrealism, screwball, sophisticated, verbal humor of the standup comic, visual slapstick, insult humor, observational humor, are just some of the styles that were popular for awhile then not.
Mysteries are the same.
For some reason the British seem to remember their past authors better than Americans who are more likely to remember Christie than Ellery Queen. I think Wodehouse is better remembered in Britain and in America only by people who watch PBS and BBCA.
What killed the screwball film comedy was the freedom of speech. The screwball comedy was the only way for writers to write sex comedies during the era of the Hays Commission and heavy censorship of the era.
But other forms of screwball comedy still exist from the silly comedy mysteries of Janet Evanovich to the films of Melissa McCarthy to the TV series such as ARCHER. Of course if you attached a turbo to the dead body of Will H. Hays and make him watch those he would spin so fast you could power a large American city.
Tastes change but often it is lack of availability that results in the author fading in memory. I am a history buff and am always amused by how easy it is to guess the age of any critic – their Top Ten rarely includes anything that existed before they were born.
Speaking of great screwball comedy mysteries, I am currently reading Robert L. Fish’s THE MURDER LEAGUE.
November 6th, 2015 at 8:51 am
I found THE CORPSE STEPS OUT disappointing too. Despite being a big Craig Rice fan.
Best part: the debut of her series policeman. Malone’s friend and police contact, Daniel von Flanagan. He does some sound detective work (Chapters 17-18). Flanagan becomes more of a comic character in later and better Rice novels. He is more “serious” here in his debut.
November 6th, 2015 at 3:59 pm
Michael,
I found Spencer and Purdue good for one book and the joke ran out after that. He is much more Alternative than brilliant for me. For a better satire on PI fiction I enjoyed Mark Shorr’s Red Diamond, which also was a paen to pulp and paperback fiction and tough PI heroes from Dan Turner to Mike Hammer.
It wasn’t that I minded Spencer’s experiment, it just didn’t work that well for me at novel length.
Fish is one of the masters. I still recall THE MURDER LEAGUE.
I think screwball died as much of mediocre actors, directors, and writers as of free speech. I see few actors, directors, or writers today that show any sign of being able to handle the rapid fire dialogue of a Hawks comedy, the rampant sentiment mixed with cynicism of a Capra, the controlled anarchy of Sturges, the cynical genius of Wilder, or the quiet frustration of a Stevens comedy.
Screwball came out of French farce and European traditions learned by American directors from men like Lubitch though with an addition of American vitality and rude wit. In fiction it came from film comedy by way of Twain, most often a smart urban take on the folksy humor of the past. It came largely out of theater more than print.
Some of Evanovitch I agree is screwball, but as for McCarthy’s films those are more often slapstick than screwball a much different tradition though both depend on anarchy for their laughs. She is much closer to Abbot and Costello or even Jerry Lewis than Hawks, Ford, or Stevens. True screwball has much in common with romantic comedy and most screwball mystery films and books fall within the broad romantic comedy genre. McCarthy is much closer to the clown tradition of silent films than the talkie born screwball film.
I do think you underestimate Wodehouse fan base. I run across fellow lovers in the strangest places and the books do well as e-books. I don’t argue he is anything like a household name, but then he wasn’t when Hollywood was filming his books and he was penning screenplays for Fred Astaire films. He was always a special favorite of a large but special audience and not the great general public.
Ironic but he is probably read more today than when I first started reading him in the sixties. Some writers like Wodehouse, C.S. Forester, and Georgette Heyer may not seem as popular as they once were with the decline of the mass market paperback, but they still have legions of fans. The e-book has made it easier to keep writers in print who perhaps don’t have the large audience they once did, but who still have a strong fan base.
November 6th, 2015 at 5:57 pm
One of the growing waste of time is trying to define what fiction terms mean. Noir, screwball, comedy, mystery, thriller, suspense, as with the word beauty have become defined by one’s point of view and how it is used in a sentence.
I would use the word absurd before I would use screwball to describe Keeler but I knew what Mike meant. My view of screwball goes back to the turn of the 20th century comic strips when surreal and silly were often called screwball.
November 7th, 2015 at 7:07 pm
Michael,
I’m not hard and fast about genres of film, but screwball in film refers to a particular kind of film with certain clear tropes. You wouldn’t call ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN screwball anymore than you would call MORE THE MERRIER slapstick. There are a handful of genuine farces that may confuse the issue, but even those are fairly easily to identify.
Again in reference to Keeler, the implication is that he was trying to be funny, and nothing I have read about him or his work suggests that. He seems to have been quite serious about his mystery novels which also undermines absurdist or surrealist, both implying the effect was deliberate. For me bizarre fits Keeler better than anything else. I suspect he never even chuckled at his own gaffes.
I do think definitions are important to the extent we can’t really discuss film or books without them. I’ll grant Noir is overused to describe every black and white crime film made, but most screwball films and books fit into a pretty identifiable mode and good or bad the effect is deliberate. I would only argue Keeler was never trying to be funny so identifying him with any humor tradition suggests his books are successful. Truth his they are almost to the book pitiful failures we laugh at and not with. He possessed a sort of anti-genius that makes his work interesting to read and funny from our perspective, but I can’t say I ever read one line of his work where I thought he was anything but dead serious no matter how ridiculous he got.