HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Skull of the Waltzing Clown. E. P. Dutton, hardcover, 1935.

   I picked this one up at the last minute to read on a Plane Ride a while back, and I have to say I couldn’t have picked any better.

   It had been a few years since I’d read any Keeler, and though I remembered him fondly as the author of the Strangest Mysteries Ever Written, I’d somehow forgotten just how uniquely talented a writer he really was — in his own way.

   I’ve never read a line of dialogue in a Keeler book that really rang true, never paused over an evocative description nor savored a poetic passage. Keeler’s characters are memorable enough, but none have ever really sprung to life for me, and there are no striking action scenes, breathless chases, or any of the other fol-de-rol that marks lesser writers like Woolrich, Hammett or Chandler.

   No, what makes a Keeler novel is his sheer audacity. No writer before or since has ever dared give such free rein to his own imagination, thrown down the gauntlet to Conventional Realism with such elan, hazarded Disbelief so cavalierly, or sneered so easily in the face of Wildest Coincidence. Nothing is too outrageous for a Keeler novel, and it is this sensation — that literally anything at all might occur — that makes reading him such a delight.

   The Skull of the Waltzing Clown consists mostly of an extended conversation between two men in a room in Chicago. At the same time, though, it’s much more than that: Tales are told, adventures recounted, characters described, letters produced, facts and fictions proven and disproven, bought and sold, until finally the conversation turns into a sort of Metaphysical Crap Shoot, where the players take turns tossing dice at Reality until the classic, last-paragraph denouement.

   I could describe the plot more concretely, I guess, but there’s no point in summarizing a Keeler novel. They have to be read, experienced, to be appreciated, and this one … well it was the perfect literary equivalent of DisneyWorld.