NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler SocietyNo. 65 ................................ December, 2007

� KeelerNews No. 65

As I suspected, chairing an academic depart-ment takes time. So in the absence of any people screaming their eagerness to take over the edit-ing of this journal, I’m going to reduce its fre-quency to four times a year, with the intention of keeping it going for quite a few years to come. In �008, KeelerNews will be published in March, June, September, and December. Your cost is going down accordingly (see elsewhere on this page). With the help of our members, KeelerNews will continue to shine as the finest (and only) peri-odical in its field. Here I’d like to single out Bill Poundstone for my gratitude, for his excellent contributions in this issue. I’ve already located some more good archival material for the News in �008: a set of letters that Harry sent to his alma mater, the Illinois (for-merly Armour) Institute of Technology, in his last couple of decades—and a never-before-pub-lished photo of our hero.

✍ Fender Tucker has in his possession the un-finished manuscript of HSK’s novel Killer, and a fine idea for what to do with it: “I’m envisioning an eventual 400-page book, �50 pages devoted to the Keeler-written portion, with an introduc-tion (perhaps by Mike), followed by four or five endings, all written by different people inde-pendently.” It could be the best thing since The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Keep your eyes on this newsletter for further details.

✍ A frightening November 7 Reuters report spotted by Ed Park: “Doctors in India have suc-cessfully operated on a �-year-old girl born with four arms, four legs and extra internal organs, doctors said on Wednesday. A team of around 30 medics removed what amounted to Lakshmi Tatma’s headless identical twin sister who was joined at the pelvis and who did not develop and separate properly in the womb—an extremely rare case. … Lakshmi’s parents are poor labour-ers from Bihar state in northern India. They told newspapers that they had refused offers from circus owners to buy their daughter.” Once again, life imitates Keeler—and we all assumed that Legga was pure fantasy!

It is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of life twisted into a pattern

mathematically and geometrically true, that fills the gaps in one’s spirit which rebels at the

looseness of life as it apparently is.

No. 65, December 2007

On our cover: Ziff’s, January 1926

(For its tenuous connectionto Keeler, see p. 14)

Editor’s Notes .........................................2

Trapped in the Closet ............................3

Imitate Keeler winner ............................6

A Sentence from the Master ...................8

Keeler & Dutton XIV: 1933-34 .................9

Books for Sale ......................................13

Keelerian Magazine Update .................14

Letters ..................................................16

Published quarterly (starting 2008)by the Harry Stephen Keeler Society4745 Winton Rd.Cincinnati, OH 45232 USA513-591-1226polt@xavier.edu

keelersociety.mondoplex.com

Editor: Richard Polt

2008 subscription:$12/year, North America$16/year, elsewhereElectronic subscription:$4/year worldwide

ISSN 1524-2323

NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society

KeelerNews No. 65 3

Being trapped in a world that operates in this strange way—a way that suggests not mere bad writing, but rather an entirely different conception of our world’s logic—is addictive, intriguing, and undeniably thrilling… it is not just another example of something that is so-bad-it’s-funny: the specific ways in which it is ‘bad’ are so peculiar, so original and so unique that it practically requires judgment by a whole new set of criteria. I have come to the conclusion that this must be because it is the brainchild of a man whose mind works in a very different way to the kind of person who we usually find telling stories.

—James MacDowell, Alternate Takes website

It will come as no surprise that MacDowell is talking about a man from Chicago. It may be a surprise that the man in question is not Har-ry Stephen Keeler but the king of R&B. He’s R. Kelly, whose web-serialized music video Trapped in the Closet may be the most dementedly Kee-leresque work of pop culture today. Billed as a “hip-hopera,” Trapped is no less a webwork op-era. There’s a physical freak, ethnic stereotypes and dialect, and especially a plot consisting of an uninterrupted string of over-the-top coinci-dences and revelations that different characters are one and the same person. The Independent Film Channel website helpfully supplies an in-teractive webwork diagram. The reviews of Trapped in the Closet are much like Keeler’s: scorched-earth bad. About 90 per-cent of the Google hits are along the lines of “OMG! What was he thinking?” YouTubers e-mail links to Trapped the way they did for that Numa-Numa guy. “A perfect storm of the worst artistry ever,” wrote a poster on the IFC site. “Hands down without a doubt the worst mu-sic video in the history of the internet,” said the Diggnation podcast. Trapped was music before it was video. In 2005 Kelly began sending a series of continuous-narrative songs to radio stations. The first video installments appeared just about when YouTube launched, and Trapped spread virally. There are 22 “chapters” (so far), each a few minutes long,

streamed at the IFC site (www.ifc.com). Trapped begins with a skyline shot of that Strange London of the West. Sylvester (one of a number of characters played by Kelly) wakes up in the bed of a woman who’s not his wife. He’s hung over and can’t remember how he got there. Before he can get the story, the woman warns him her husband is coming home. They hear the husband coming up the stairs, so Sylvester hides in the bedroom closet. Husband and wife imme-diately start having sex. Sylvester’s cell phone rings and gives him away. He pulls out his Be-retta as the angry husband opens the closet… Kelly is singing all this. He narrates and sup-plies all the dialog, male and female, as the ac-tors lip-synch. Think that’s a little weird? Believe me, you’ve got to see it and hear it to know how weird. As needed, Kelly does falsetto, accents, stuttering, and an imitation of a bad cell phone connection. I’m not spoiling much by saying that every chapter ends on bizarre revelations, pulled guns, and/or people looking for other people hiding in closets. Could Kelly have heard of Keeler? I’d have to say it’s unlikely, despite some striking parallels (see list, p. 5). More likely Kelly intended some-thing along the lines of Tyler Perry meets Desper-ate Housewives meets Pulp Fiction. It’s fair to say that Kelly transcends any influences, much as Keeler transcended the tamely commercial S.S. Van Dine mysteries he may have taken as mod-els. Kelly’s self-imposed constraint is that his sung narration covers everything we see hap-pening in real time. It’s not so much High School Musical as play-by-play commentary—no dead air allowed. “And then he looks at the cabinet / He walks to the cabinet / He close to the cabinet / Now he’s openin’ the cabinet…” This has the effect of reminding us what a peculiar thing lan-guage is, and how inadequate it is to represent reality. (I think that’s a semi-intentional running theme of Keeler, too.) Kelly is also playing with the manipulative power of film. The music cre-scendos towards the end of each chapter as the vocals and editing ramp up the emotional pitch. It’s much like the climax of a suspense film, only Trapped is all climax, all shocking revelation, all the last ten minutes of Psycho in which no late-

“Trapped in the Closet”: The Webwork Operaby William Poundstone

4 KeelerNews No. 65

coming audience members will be seated. One non-Keeler comparison that comes to mind is Christian Marclay’s Telephones, the film created by editing together clips of people answering the phone in old movies. You’re not supposed to make a film like that, nor a film that’s all cli-max, nor a novel that’s all plot, nor a plot that’s all coincidences. Kelly and Keeler binge on tech-niques at the top of the cinematographic/liter-ary food pyramid (“Use sparingly”). Trapped has spawned a corpus of parodies and response videos, including skits on Satur-day Night Live and Mad TV, a Weird Al Yankov-ic spoof, and a South Park episode of the same title. (It was the Tom Cruise /Scientology epi-sode, which got a lot of attention for other rea-sons. Released before Trapped had become such a phenomenon, it left many viewers mystified at why R. Kelly was in Stan’s closet with Cruise.) A DVD version of Trapped has Kelly’s director’s commentary on himself (as singer-narrator) com-menting on himself (as actor) playing a charac-ter who is a thinly veiled self-portrait. It also has Kelly explaining his philosophy of “this global closet thing.” “And yet there is something slightly unnerv-ing about the kind of attention ‘Trapped in the Closet’ has received,” wrote the New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh. “Many of its biggest fans seem to think they’re laughing at Mr. Kelly, not with him, as if the whole thing were some sort of glorious, terrible mistake; as if the far-fetched plot turns (most infamously, the policeman cuck-olded by the ‘midget’ hiding beneath the sink)

and cliffhanger endings (‘Oh my God, a rub-ber!’) were the work of someone who set out to make a traditional musical and failed.” Sanneh detects “the kind of praise that can easily sound like condescension.” This could easily describe the mainstream media’s reaction to Keeler (what little there is of it). It often seems that Keeler can make the Wall Street Journal or NPR only in the guise of “the worst mystery writer who ever lived.” I feel some personal guilt on that score. When I did my Keeler webpage in the 1990s, I referred to him as “the Ed Wood of mystery writers.” I didn’t mean to equate the two. Wood is bad bad, and Keeler is a genius who happens to strike most people as bad. There’s a difference! I’ve seen the Ed Wood analogy repeated a number of times. Somehow that spreads virally, whereas Keeler-as-genius is a perpetual nonstarter (pres-ent company excepted). The title of Sanneh’s article is “Outrageous Farce From R. Kelly: He’s In on the Joke, Right?” People ask that about Keeler, too. I believe the answer in both cases has to be “yes.” You don’t conceive of a cuckolding midget under the sink or an aeronautical strangler-baby without in-tending more or less exactly the reactions that these creations have gotten. The real question is why so many people are able to view Trapped, and Keeler’s whole oeuvre, only through those cobalt-blue spectacles of “so bad it’s good.” I’m not sure I can answer that. I can say that the les-son of the YouTube age seems to be that you take what buzz you can get and hope for the best. N

Trapped in the Closet character diagram by Andrew Kuo

KeelerNews No. 65 5

6 KeelerNews No. 65

Huffnagel Kittenplan, the world’s stingiest hillbilly, was dead—dead, moreover, in a place where London’s smart set wouldn’t be caught dead!—namely the bordello run by Madame Yeardleigh Wieczorekiatrwalczakryzclokowic-zldchmielewski—an establishment notorious for the fact that all of its women of easy virtue were also trained stenographers—allowing their fees to be deducted—legally!—on the visitor’s income taxes—assuming said visitor itemized! This fact was of commanding importance for Boyce Pettaway, a bright-faced American of about �7-3/4, for unless Pettaway could solve what Scotland Yard was calling the “Kittenplan Enigma”—or the “Conundrum of the Pneumatic Strangler Whore”—posthaste and pronto!—Pet-taway’s chances for connubial happiness would be as dead as that skinflint bumpkin! “The facts are these, Boyce,” began Inspector Livingston Watrous, K.B.E. “On May 17, Huffna-gel Kittenplan was seen entering Madame Wiec-zorekiatrwalczakryzclokowiczldchmielewski’s establishment. The Madame remarked that there was a package for Kittenplan, and had a girl fetch it for him—after he assured himself that no ‘tip’ was expected! This package was a wooden box about 30 inches by 30 inches by 10 inches, with a handwritten label addressed to ‘H. Kit-tenplan’—but no return address of any kind! He took it into a private room—alone!—and locked the door behind him.” “Unt dot iss de lasd anyvun efer saw uf dat yillbilly Yuffnagel Kiddenblan—vile alive, dat iss!” interjected Detective Adolfo Bioy Messer-schmidt—a consultant on homicides of the un-couth who had autogyro’d in from Buenos Ai-res. “De next day, two Bridish bolice chimmied de door oben unt fount him strankled!” “That’s the puzzlement, Boyce!—Kittenplan was strangled—while alone!—in a room locked from inside! There are no other entrances to the room, not even windows. It seems they’re barmy about privacy there because the place adjoins the editorial offices of that gossip rag, The Pry-nose—and Madame’s clients tend to be loud! The room Kittenplan was in—a simple bedroom and

bathroom of miserly proportions—was therefore supplied with velvet drapes, but only a solid ex-panse of brick wall behind them. After the police broke in, they searched the entire place. There was no one else in that room.” “You’re saying Kittenplan strangled himself?” “Nein, nein, dot iss imbossible!” objected Messerschmidt. “In der first blace, de yillbil-lies ub de Abbalachian region—from vere dis man Kiddenblan iss from!—haf a congenidal quirk, amblified drough inbreeding, dat makes dem combledely unable to taste butterscotch! A zo-called ‘butterscotch idiot’—as id iss known technically!—vill, as a heredidary zide effect, be lacking in ubber-body strength. Id iss a debat-able boint vether anyvun coot strankle himself vit his own mitts—bud in Kiddenblan’s case, iss medigally imbossible!” The Teutonic Argentine then opened a portfo-lio and produced a newspaper clipping that he shoved over the table to Boyce:

‘Pneumatic Strangler Whore’ Strikes?

Police theorize that Kittenplan was provided not with a woman but with a blow-up doll of infernal design—the substitution facilitated by the dim lighting in the Wieczorekiatrwal-czakryzclokowiczldchmielewski establish-ment and the myopic victim’s refusal to bear the expense of prescription lenses. A police source suggested that the ‘doll’ was designed so that the slightest pressure would cause its arms to lock around the victim’s neck in a death grip, strangling him. The device was presumably supplied with a miniature clock-work mechanism that punctured the doll after a time interval, allowing it to deflate. The flattened doll could then be retrieved by pulling an attached nylon line and drawing it under the 1/4th-inch crack at the bottom of the one door to Kittenplan’s room. Police suspect this ‘pneumatic strangler whore’ was deployed by Madame W. in a retribution kill-ing for Kittenplan’s long-delinquent ‘tab.’

And now for Bill’s own webwork creation, winner of this year’s Imitate Keeler Competition…

The Box from Nowhere!by William Poundstone

KeelerNews No. 65 7

“We found the ‘box from nowhere’ in the room,” Inspector Watrous explained. “It had been opened and was completely empty. Which is queer because the Cockney wench who fetched it swears it was heavy. So whatever was in that box is missing, gone, scrammed, AWOL, vamoosed! That’s why we suspect a self-inflating—and self-deflating—pneumatic device concealed in the box—something that popped up like a Jack-in-the-box!—or a Jezebel-in-the-box!” At this peculiar suggestion, Pettaway made a moue—though remained silent! “Anyway, Boyce, there’s another case where you might be able to help us—a most curious se-ries of thefts.” “De Birade uf B’s!” Messerschmidt said. “Er—‘The Pirate of P’s,’ that is, Boyce—as the Fleet Street paper-blackeners call him!” “You mean the guy—or gal!—who’s been stealing all manner of objects whose names start with the letter ‘P’?” Pettaway asked. “Pork and pickles and petunias? It’s been all over the news.” “The news hasn’t reported the half of it, I’m afraid. In the week ending May 19, just in Greater London, we’ve had thefts of pots, Pekin-ese pups, petrified wood, perukes, planchettes, polyester placemats, Picasso prints, prairie dogs, pinking shears.” “Unt bitchforks!” added the Argentine. “Now why would someone be stealing things beginning with the letter ‘P’—and only with the letter ‘P’? We have one lead. It’s a poem that ran in the Daily Mail some two years ago.

Poem—With a Capital ‘P’!By Condoleezza Van Pryne

A yegg there was, who hatch’d a scheme,Of wealth beyond his wildest dream!He’d snatch all loot, whate’er it be—As long as what’s swiped, started with ‘P.’Including the heart of a Poetess—Me!

“Naturally, we checked out this poetess lady—and she’s as clean as a whistle—left in a shirt sent to a Chinese laundry—for French dry-cleaning! So there you have it, Boyce. Explain the thefts—or the murder!—and I may be able to offer you a job—with a salary that will allow you to save enough money to marry that fiancée of yours!” “I’m afraid money is only half the jam I’m in,

sir. My fiancée has her heart set on a June wed-ding. And of course, next year, the whole world adopts the Universal Scientific Metric Calen-dar—in which June, and part of July, are replaced with the month of ‘Einstein’! Which means that after this year, June is officially—” “Kaput!” “And so is my prospect of getting hitched! Because my fiancée has such a strong revulsion to all things metric, that rather than consent to an ‘Einstein wedding,’ she’s vowed to become a missionary nun—and suffragette!—in the can-nibal islands of the Torres Strait!”

Boyce Pettaway, having cudgeled his brains five long nights, once again found himself seat-ed across a table from the two detectives. “In my experience, sirs,” he began, “the smart criminals use the ‘webwork kinematic’ method of crime construction. They clip articles of unusual news stories and file them until they need to plot a new atrocity. Then they weave random clippings together into a crime defying the Yard’s Sherlock Holmes style of cogitation! I believe that is pre-cisely what Madame W. did, when she decided to murder her deadbeat customer, Huffnagel Kittenplan! “Madame must have seen that Condoleezza Van Pryne poem in the paper. As to the rest of it, I believe we all have seen those occasional news-paper accounts of pet pythons being found in the toilet—or ‘W.C.’ in your Limey argot! I found this one at the Daily Mail morgue:

NYC Woman Finds Python in the ToiletNew York Woman Screams After Seeing

7-Foot Python Peeking Out From Her Toilet

NEW YORK (AP) There was no Halloween bogeyman in the closet for one Brooklyn woman, just a 7-foot-long python in her toilet. Nadege Brunacci was washing her hands in her bathroom be-fore dawn Monday when she glanced back and saw the slithering serpent peeking out from her toilet, most of its body hidden in the pipes…

“Pythons dislike being confined. When kept as a pet in a small apartment, they are prone to escape through the toilet! The snake turns up in a nearby apartment’s bathroom, producing one very surprised neighbor and a few column-inch-

8 KeelerNews No. 65

es of grade-A journalistic filler! “You see, the ‘box from nowhere’ contained ‘Mitzi,’ the reticulated python recently stolen from the London Zoo. Under more normal cir-cumstances, Scotland Yard would have paid more attention to the fact that a dangerous constrictor was loose in the city—in this case, however, you were also puzzling over the simultaneous thefts of pandas and pangolins and Przewalski hors-es—all rarer and more valuable species!—which were themselves just part of a lexigraphic crime wave of missing protractors, power drills, and plagiarized publications of Platonic philoso-phizing! All of it, I say, engineered by Madame W. as a smoke screen to cover the only theft that mattered to her, the python. “Kittenplan opened the box, and—being raised in a part of the Bible Belt where snake handling is routinely practiced in church ser-vices!—he was less alarmed by its contents than you or I might have been—especially since his dime-store reading glasses would have made the snake look smaller than it actually was! Also, that old miser was doubtless aware that a py-thon can be sold for quite a bit of money to snake fanciers! But this snake easily overpowered him. You realize that no constricting snake crushes—they suffocate their prey by tightening their grip each time it exhales—producing the same foren-sic signs as in throttling by a human assailant. The snake was of course too small to consume Kittenplan’s body. Finding itself without proper food, it escaped by the only means of egress pos-sible—the toilet!” “Brilliant!” said the Inspector. “We arrest Ma-dame W. straight off!” “There’s one more thing,” Boyce said. “Kit-tenplan left a most peculiar will. Thanks to his lifelong pennypinching—and the miracle of compound interest!—Kittenplan accumulated an estate of some $23 million. His will bequeaths all that mazuma to ‘whatever person is with me to the end, and in whose arms I die.’ Madame’s establishment is located in Southwark, a district of London that is technically part of France, go-ing back to the Norman Conquest. Did you know that, under medieval French law, a reptile is con-sidered to be a ‘person’?—and the clause about dying in someone’s arms would be unenforce-able in a French court of law because a snake’s arms are decidedly non-est!—the upshot is that all those simoleons go to Mitzi, the python! “Unfortunately, I’m certain that Mitzi is now

deceased—Madame W. would have killed it—or her!—to destroy the evidence. If my deduction is correct, the moola actually goes to Mitzi’s next of kin.” “Vich vould be—anudder bython!” conclud-ed Messerschmidt. “Gott Verdammt!” “Not necessarily! This python was legally adopted by a human being—namely, the snake dancer, Livia Darkbloom!—known to the world of burlesque as the Amazon of Asps!—who do-nated the python to the London Zoo after it got too big to use in her act! She’s still legally the creature’s mother—and sole heir! I might add that Darkbloom happens to be featured in Vol-ume III of Reamsnyder’s 1000 Lady Poets Whose Words Make Living a Joy—under her penname, Condoleezza Van Pryne!—and also happens to be—my fiancée! Which means, from the timing of things, that we can invite both of you to—” “Ach du lieber! A Chune vedding—by Gott!!!” N

In the March �008 issue of

HSK, Platonist

A Sentence from the MasterHad anyone told that practical and matter-of-fact young man whose unusual satirical book Mr. Monte Zenda of Graustark was very shortly to be published, exactly why he had been so rudely awakened and what was to eventuate from the cause of that awakening, he would have been more bewildered than he was the day that the New York publish-ers, Macrae, Macrae and Macrae, Incorpo-rated, had telegraphed him their enthusias-tic acceptance of his curious piece of literary work.

The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman

NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society

KeelerNews No. 65 9

In our last issue we focused on material directly rele-vant to The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. We now back up to December 1933 and take a look at some of the non-Skull correspondence from this period.

I see a couple more novelists are canceled out of the equation: [Robert W.] Chambers and [Lou-is J.] Vance—the latter, of course, a web-work mystery plottist—in fact, I used to analyze his novels, structurally, in my own early days at the game, to find what time gaps were permissable between chapters—where, changes of view-point—etc. etc. etc. He seemed to have—what I wanted to be! … If I can keep in line by keeping alive—mebbe someday I’ll get shoved to the top in spite of my work! [HSK to EBM, 12/19/33]

For some reason, I do not know why, and proba-bly never will, my sales in England have steadily and persistently crept upward (quite outside of the happy advance in the pound sterling) and I am today earning, from each book, darned near what I am earning—in toto—in the panic over here—from each book on this side. … Well, mebbe my future fame lies in H’Ingland. [HSK to EBM, 12/20/33]

Thank you for the Kubla Khan. I found it interest-ing for the reason that many of the interpretations of the symbolic language in the poem—written in the late 18th century—conform perfectly to the occult philosophy of Ouspensky, of late �0th century, in whom I have read deeply since my mother’s death. I question whether Vassos him-self did all that interpretation: I doubt whether any artist ever thought deeply enough; artists are artists—and philosophers are philosophers—but that doesn’t matter greatly! [On John Vassos, see KN #60.] Thanks again. Me, I’m still sweating blood over Vagabond Nights—and nothing symbolic over that! I believe it’ll be one of the high-spots of my writing career—and Lord knows I’ve taken it apart enough times and put it together again so that it’ll be 101 percent perfect. [HSK to EBM, 12/27/33]

Keeler & Dutton: Part 14 (1933-34)by Richard Polt

Louis J. Vance, web- work master? I’d never heard of him, but apparently Vance (1879-1933) was quite successful in his day. I checked out an early Vance, The Brass Bowl (Bobbs-Merrill, 1907). Things get off to a good start here, with our wealthy New York hero embroiled in a puzzling situa-tion featuring a mysterious lady in grey, a thief that looks just like him, and late-night shenani-gans. The thief, Anisty, is very good at imperson-ating the hero, Maitland, which leads to various amusing situations. Still, it wasn’t long before the high-flown descriptions of the tender senti-ments of the aristocrats and the smirking carica-tures of their “inferiors” got on my nerves. After the climactic shootout, high on the 20th floor of a sky-scraper, I was relieved to reach the end. Still, I’m not sorry I read this book. For there is a particular situation where Maitland enters his own house and the lady in grey mistakes him for Anisty—a cracksman who “opens by ear, so to speak,—listens to the combination.” Yes! I have no doubt that this is the germ that, transformed by the young Keeler’s sensibility, turned into the much more streamlined and cleverly constructed story “The Services of an Expert”—and, when hy-

pertrophied and turned inside out and upside down by the mature K e e l e r ’ s methodical m a d n e s s , turned into The Man With the Magic Ear-drums. —RP

The Lady in Grey, from The Brass Bowl

10 KeelerNews No. 65

I’m still holding the property—even though I don’t get one cent net out of it! [HSK to EBM, 12/28/33]

HSK attached a news clipping: “State street subway condemnation proceedings, dormant for a year, have been revived….” As you may recall, he was desper-ately waiting for his boyhood home on State Street to be bought by the city, which needed to expand the street for subway construction.

A two-page publicity piece on Keeler prepared by Dutton in early 1934 includes the following:

He attended the Chicago [actually Armour] In-stitute of Technology …. Mr. Keeler has certain theories about writing—one that though mys-tery stories need not always be plausible, they must always be comprehensible—and this latter must include accurateness, to the letter, in de-tail. As may well be imagined, this has brought about a thorough self-education for this au-thor—including such diversities as a detailed study of the muscles of the human eye, involv-ing a field of mechanics with which oculists in general, being only medical men, are not famil-iar; and an extreme study of insane asylums and psychiatric practice. He even entered several asylums as a voluntary patient in order to gain the confidence of the inmates for use in his book, “The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro.” Mr. Keeler has gathered material from the artist quarters of Paris and London and Chicago, which he con-siders “the three mystery cities of the world.” His work room is not the preconceived bedlam of the artist, but chest after chest of systemati-cally filed drawers containing such practicalities as: “Maps, Guides, and Time Tables,” “Streets,” “Foreign Cities,” “Plot Gems,” “Descriptions of Technical Processes,” “Photographs of Odd Human Types,” “Swindles,” “Lost Treasures of the World,” “Dialects,” “Jargon,” “Jewels,” “Cu-rios,” “Relics,” “News Accounts of Secret Diplo-macy,” “Descriptions of Males,” “Descriptions of Females,” “Odd Names for People,” and doz-ens more. The accuracy of his details once cost Mr. Keeler the fright of a $50,000 suit, brought against him by a Chinese girl who had helped him collect data for “The Clock Broke” [sic]. She charged that the heroine, a girl of loose mor-als, bore such resemblance to her that her fiance broke their engagement. Mr. Keeler, whose stories are wound of some-

times as many as seven into one, keeps a black board chart of colored thumb tacks to keep track of the situations he is molding. He believes that the basic tests of value for the mystery stories are: 1st, Interest; 2nd, convincingness; 3rd, nov-elty. … Mr. Keeler’s latest novel, “The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman,” concerns a cracksman who uses not dynamite, but a violin; a second-hand safe with amazing secrets inside; a volcanic island in the Pacific and a fantastic kingdom in Europe; a demented Oriental; and a pair of lov-ers caught in the very center of this whirl-pool of danger and detection.

Now for a letter that will be of particular interest to Keeler fans who are also copyright lawyers (such as Mike Nevins)—and to film buffs who have wondered why the “Sing Sing Nights” movie is so different from the novel (though the difference is not quite cleared up here) …

I enclose herewith two checks, a red one and a green one. The red one, for $84.07 represents Duttons’ share of a movie-transaction …. The movie sale was for a version of Sing Sing Nights, not the same as the Dutton book version. A version in fact published and copyrighted a year or so in advance, and, in fact, specially written and put together by me for a Mr. H. K. Fly who at that time was an active publisher (of magazines) with a Bert Mackinnon. Their mag-azine empire has since blown up, and I don’t know where each of them are today. … The deal was under way for many weeks—5 weeks or more. My telegraph bill will be at least $22 for all the wires I had to send to Hollywood, New York, Boston, Mass. etc. etc. It first began with an offer from Monogram of $650 for movie rights to the Dutton Sing Sing Nights. After con-siderable sasaying on the part of the agent, it got finally boosted to $750. However, the offer proved insufficient to be able to placate Street and Smith with; they own the movie rights in the Gorilla novelette, and the Giant Moth novel-ette, which, as you will recall, occur in your ver-sion of Sing Sing Nights. … ([They were not] in on the Confucious novelette, all rights of which I had gotten back from its original magazine pub-lisher.) … After the deal went down, we attempted to revive it, presenting another Sing Sing Nights, a version copyrighted and published long ahead

KeelerNews No. 65 11

of the Dutton Sing Sing Nights. The only points of similarity were the Confucious novelette, and the story of the three convicts locked in their cell. This version met with far more enthusiasm than the first version; Monogram found objec-tion, anyway, in the Dutton version because of the impossibility of providing so many actors and so many settings to play out three (or 4) entirely different novelettes. In the version sub-mitted them, the other two “told” novelettes em-brace the same set of characters as occur in the Confucious novelette, i.e. the hero, Jason Barton, the city editor, Frangenac, etc. etc. With many of the same settings …. However, a new complication ensued. The other two novelettes had been developed by me from stories owned lock stock and barrell (though from my pen) by a Mr. Cassino of Salem, Mass. My additional matter made it possible for them to weave to the Confucius story; they were no good in themselves; on the other hand, my additional matter was built upon them. After considerable negotiations with Mr. Cassino, an arrangement was finally arrived at as to his pro-portional rights …. I’ve never been through such a wearisome mess in my life …. One consolation is that the Gorilla story and the Giant Moth story (in the Dutton Sing Sing Nights) are still free …. I have no regrets at making the sale. It’s about time I broke into the movies. … You might hold these checks a couple of days till I’m sure the movie check has cleared. I don’t trust these Hollywood people any further than I can throw a boxcar full of iron anvils with a palsied left wrist. [HSK to EBM, 1/11/34]

I have read Mr. Keeler’s letter of January 11 … It is rather labored and I believe that he is cov-ering something up. Mr. H. K. Fly was at one time a book publisher in New York City. I never heard of his being a magazine publisher. Mr. Keeler says: “Their magazine empire has since blown up”; but he does not give the name of the magazine in which this version is supposed to have appeared. [According to my research, Mackinnon-Fly Publications was in fact a maga-zine chain—Ed.] … All I can say is that this is a complicated web-work of explanation and evidently Mr. Keeler carries on his business in the same complicated way that he writes his sto-ries. … I should be inclined to accept the check

which he has sent us and give him the benefit of the doubt …. Mr. Keeler was a fool to sell the moving picture rights of four of these stories for such a small sum; furthermore, he was not above board in carrying on these negotiations without saying something to us. He gets little enough for the millions of words that he turns out and he is evidently a very bad business man. [MSY to EBM, 1/15/34]

May I acknowledge your long and interesting explanation as to the moving picture sale of Sing Sing Nights. Quite honestly, I doubt my ability to grasp the in’s and out’s of just what has oc-curred, but the main point is that we accept with thanks your check …. I quite understand that this particular sale was a difficult one to make, and I sympathize with you on the many prob-lems which had to be overcome. I think you will agree that what you have gotten out of it is very, very small. Now that you have made this start let’s hope that bigger things will come. A word of advice and caution—our suggestion is that on the next moving picture sale you talk in terms of $5,000 and $6,000 and possibly start with $7,500 with a minimum of $5,000. Your stuff is worth every bit of that for the moving picture people. [EBM to HSK, 1/26/34]

I liked the cover of Fiddling Cracksman immense-ly, though my wife, who is more the true artist than I am, said it was the best cover Duttons have ever done on any of the Keeler books. She ad-vised me to call strenuously for David Berger on

12 KeelerNews No. 65

all future books—and so I transmit the call—by expert advice thereto! About your last paragraph—and re movie prices—well—this was a small independent company—used to paying $500—it took a long tough fight even to get them above $650—to $750—they weren’t in the $5000 class, that’s all. … PS: I may as well put in my order right now for Fiddling Cracksman … I have to auto-graph same, make labels, wrap and all that … I would like … all copies reading 4th edition—or 5th edition—or whatever is the highest number “edition” shown by that date …. [HSK to EBM, 1/30/34]

David Berger never illustrated another Keeler.

Money problems harass authors—and you’ve little idea how they inhibit an author’s ideas, and his execution of such ideas. They bother publish-ers, too, but the mechanics of publishing goes on the same, regardless of financial problems. What I am trying to get at is that invention, with the cells of the brain, is a peculiar process, not very well understood, that can go “kaflooey” very eas-ily—and with the most ridiculous (sometimes) outside stimuli. … Can you see your way clear to a monthly arrangement of $100 per month …? [HSK to EBM, 3/25/34]

… as of April 30th, 1934, Keeler’s royalty account will be in the red to an amount of $1,234.17. The approximate sale on the last three books is as fol-lows:

The Washington Square Enigma 3,��0The Face of the Man from Saturn �,500The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman �,500

[EBM to JM, 4/5/34]

Mr. Keeler owes us six new books. [MSY to JM, 4/5/34]

I have been scratching my head for some days over your desires as to money matters. … It would appear that we cannot afford to advance you during the coming year all you need. … It is not desirable from your standpoint nor from ours, to advance you too far ahead of what your earnings will be. The one great problem which you and I have to work out together is the problem of selling more of your books. You probably do know that the sale of books in general has been very seri-

ously cut into. The sale of books from October 1930 to October 1933—that is general books in the United States of all publishers, dropped 55½%. … My object is to have your next book so good, that I can go after the booksellers and the public in a way to increase your sales. My dear Harry Stephen Keeler, as much as you like to write long mystery stories, let me tell you with all earnestness that the public got tired of reading The Box from Japan; and the same could be applied to The Matilda Hunter Murder. A num-ber of my personal friends who became Keeler fans because I recommended you, told me that they simply got tired before they finished both of those books. … I want to publish your next book—the very best book possible; and I want to publish the very next to that—the very best possible. I want these books so good that I can force the booksell-ers and the public to take them. … With my warm personal regards and the hope you are well and that you will not allow yourself to become discouraged or unhappy over this let-ter, but that you will cooperate with me so that we can put your sales back to or above what they were prior to the great depression … [JM to HSK, 4/5/34]

I accept the new proposition … Though just how I am going to live on the sum in question isn’t clear to me; I suppose that if a real honest-to-God editorial job came along, I would have the incli-nation to jettison everything and let bookwriting go hang—for a couple of years, if necessary. The book market certainly seems to have gone to the devil. The sales on The Washington Square Enigma and The Face of the Man from Saturn are hopelessly small. Microscopic! Those were very short books. It was Mr. Yewdale’s idea, at the time, that the cross-word puzzle craze indicated a desire on the part of the public for a very short book. I gave it what it supposedly wanted. And the results—alas! … On the other hand, it is not my intention to wish on you any more gargantuan books. You do speak, however, of how much the public liked my Cagliostro. Have you ever thought of the fact that Cagliostro was around 185,000 words long? Its length didn’t keep people from liking it! You speak of my liking to write long mystery stories. No, I don’t like to write long mystery stories. I am unable to gauge, that is all, often

KeelerNews No. 65 13

what the skeleton of a plot will develope into. I am not a hack, and cannot set my typewriter, as William Wallace Cook the famous pulp paper writer used to do, for so many words, and have a bell ring 5000 words before the closing point so that he could “wind up the story”! … The Mystery of the Fiddling Cracksman. I cannot give you a better book. If this book doesn’t come up to what you think is a good book, then I don’t know what to write, nor how to write it. … As for the last paragraph, I am discouraged, and I am unhappy. To toss my books on a market like this makes me feel as though I am playing the fool … I hear Dashiell Hammet has been given a job writing direct for the movies. 6 second-hand bookstores here tell me that I outsell (in second hand sales) Dashiell Hammet in their stores. I begin to understand now, why Hammet takes this job! His books evidently are not making their salt. If there is any bitterness in this letter, please forgive it. I might have been a good electrical engineer—instead, I find myself on Grub street. [HSK to JM, 4/6/34]

If Fiddling Cracksman cannot pile up a better score than �500-3000 copies, then I have to pass! To give you a better book—even if I could—would be tossing a loaf of angel cake in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at midnight, in a storm. [HSK to EBM, 4/6/34]

I am truly disturbed and grieved that my letter disturbs your good self. … You are to my mind one of the best mystery-story writers supplying books to the general public …. The truth is that Tom, Dick and Harry, Nelly, Mary and Jane are writing mystery stories; and the mystery story market has been flooded by writers who were hungry. … If the public liked Harry Stephen Keeler’s books as much as John Macrae likes them, the sale would be more than satisfying to you. … I desire to use every bit of energy and ingenuity I have when we publish your new book, to in-veigle the booksellers of the United States to put it on their counters …. It is my opinion, that until the market for re-print editions improves, we had best carry your books in stock, in the regular editions. You seem to have an idea that it is more distinguished and valuable to an author’s name to have his books

in a reprint edition … it is much more valuable to your name that we keep this book in stock in the regular edition …. If it were possible to discourage publishers, I am sure 80% of them would be discouraged. I am not discouraged and I beg of Harry Ste-phen Keeler not to be discouraged. [JM to HSK, 4/11/34]

About considering it an honor to be in the re-print books, and not in the $�.00 books, you have me wrong there. It’s simply that I get that more “well-known”—and alas, we writers, what can we hope to get out of this trying game—except to be famous or near-famous? I’m simply trying to “scrabble” as much fame as I can—while I’m still on earth. And 10,000 books, both 75 cents and $�.00, makes twice as much fame as 5000 books at $�.00! … A movie agent got me a contract to go to Hol-lywood and write direct for the screen. …I didn’t accept, though, to be sure, I began to wonder whether I made a mistake. The trouble with get-ting into a new field is that 9 times out of 10, one never goes back into the field one has left. [HSK to JM, 4/15/34]

In our next issue, we finally reach the last installment of the available Keeler-Dutton letters. N

THE CASE OF THE IVORY ARROW. Phoenix, 1945, 1st, good in vg dj, $125. Kenton Antiques & Collect-ibles, 8112 N. Denver Ave., Portland, OR 97217, 503-285-5077, info@kentonantiques.com.

CLEOPATRA’S TEARS. Dutton, 1940, 1st, x-lib, vg in vg dj, $75. Half Price Books, 13492 US Hwy 183 N, Austin, TX 78750, 512-335-5759.

FINGER, FINGER! Dutton, 1938, 1st, fair, $42. Ta-coma Book Center, 324 E. 26th St., Tacoma, WA 98421, 253-572-8248, tacbook@harbornet.com.

THE MYSTERY OF THE FIDDLING CRACKSMAN. Dutton, 1934, vg+, $20. Prospero’s Books, 9129 Center St., Manassas, VA 20110, 703-257-7895, prosperosbooks@comcast.net.

THE WONDERFUL SCHEME OF MR. CHRISTO-PHER THORNE. Dutton, 1936, 1st, vg, $50. Avalon Books, 3229 Clement Ave., Stockton, CA 95204, 209-943-2035, avalonbooks@sbcglobal.net.

14 KeelerNews No. 65

What follows is (I hope) a definitive listing of the six issues of America’s Humor edited by HSK. (For earlier stories on this topic, see KN #�4 and #47.)

vol. 6 no. 1, Summer 1926vol. 6 no. 2, Fall 1926vol. 6 no. 3, Winter 1926vol. 6 no. 4, February 1927

vol. 7 no. 1, April 1927vol. 7 no. 2, June 1927 (“Fall Number”)

Some of the Sept. 1927 issue may also have been put together by HSK, but he’s no longer listed as editor. (In my last “Editor’s Notes” I told the tale of buying a copy of this issue, only to find that it was un-Keelerish. If I had a sharper memory, I could have spared myself the bucks: Fred Cleav-er already reported this fact in KN #56, Letters.)

There never was any vol. 6, no. 5, contrary to my speculations in KN #47, p. 11.

Finally, I’ve discovered the name of the p u b l i c a t i o n before it be-came America’s Humor: Ziff’s Magazine. One hint that HSK had a hand in Ziff’s: this ad from Harry’s cat -breeding mother in the January 1926 issue. N

The story above from the Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1938, sheds some interesting light on Harry’s activities in “Printingtown.” Rev. Philip Yarrow, the Gontiers’ nemesis, was an active anti-vice crusader in Chicago in the ’30s. The confiscated filthy magazines were almost certainly issues of

10 Story Book. Post-raid is-sues of 10 Story are definitely tamer, with the women usually clad in swimsuits rather than topless. Is it a coincidence that the maga-zine went out of business about two years later? N

Keelerian Magazine Updateby Richard Polt

KeelerNews No. 65 15

10 Story Book, January 1920

Can you recognize the handwriting on “Vanniston’s” card? You get one guess.What was the novelty? Your guess is as good as mine.

16 KeelerNews No. 65

A story in the November 25 New York Times, “The Wizard of Whimsy,” features our own Ed Park and his electronic zine, The New-York Ghost.

Times: “When he needs material for the news-letter, he writes about his dreams, adopting the overexcited prose style of a Depression-era au-thor of boys’ adventure books.” Ed: “For ‘Depression-era author of boys’ ad-venture books,’ read ‘Keeler!’ (I strategically put a copy of America’s Humor in the bin by my min-iaturized left arm.)”

Top Ten (or eleven), in response to Dave Mur-ray’s question in KN #64 (I’ve now read over forty):

The Case of the Transposed LegsI, ChameleonThe Marceau CaseThe Monocled MonsterThe Riddle of the Traveling SkullThe Sharkskin BookSing Sing NightsThe “Skull in the Box” QuartetThe Skull of the Waltzing ClownThe Spectacles of Mr. CagliostroX. Jones—of Scotland Yard

Hard to pick least favorites. I would nominate Vagabond Nights as “most damaging,” but that is praise by Keeler standards. I finished both vol-umes several weeks ago and am still stunned. Keeler asks the question: Can irrelevance exist without relation to any object? If everything is irrelevant, then is everything relevant? I have toured Forrest Ackerman’s Ackerman-sion—at least until recently, he held weekly

tours for anyone who showed up at his door. You could dispatch an L. A. volunteer to go ask him about Keeler.

Edward BolmanLoudonville, N.Y.

Any volunteers?

My favorite Keeler flick has come to DVD: www.oldies.com/product-view/5472D.html

It’s from public domain king Alpha Video, but sometimes they come up with some pretty good prints. I can’t wait until they double feature this up with their copy of Mysterious Mr. Wong. Sur-prisingly, no mention of Harry in the cast and crew yet, but that’s probably just an oversight. I’m sure this will be filling many a stocking come Christmas time.

Chris WheelerWest Hollywood, Cal.

TechnicalNote

Though you wouldn’t know it from its stodgy appear-ance, Keeler News has leapt from the early ’90s (MS Word 5.1a for Mac) to the mid-aughts (Adobe InDe-sign 4.0.5 for Mac). Look for some fancier graphics next year. The PDF version also has more color con-tent now. It will be e-mailed to all subscribers on re-quest: just ask the editor at polt@xavier.edu.

Letters