Another Look at
HARRY STEPHEN KEELER
by Dan Stumpf

   

   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.

— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #4, May 1982.