Simon Jarrett takes a peek into the very strange world of a largely forgotten thriller writer Harry Stephen Keeler
The riddle of the travelling skull, 1934
The case of the two-headed idiot, 1958 (and many more)
Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) is now largely forgotten, his memory only maintained by a small group of die-hard fans. He was an extraordinary writer from Chicago who produced more than 50 books between 1924 and 1958. They are probably best described as thrillers, or murder mysteries, but that does not really tell the story.
Keeler specialised in utterly bizarre and implausible plots and often his endings, far from being neat solutions, were simply baffling. He would sometimes take a number of strange and unusual stories from newspapers, jumble them together and then make a plot from them. His characters’ names and personalities were as implausible as his plots, like the publisher Philodexter Maximum or the Chinese laundryman Ah Hell.
Jigsaw champion
In the strange landscape and bizarre fictional world created by Keeler, many ‘idiot’ types appeared. He was writing in the age of the eugenic scare period when many labelled as ‘morons’ were being rounded up and locked away in institutions, seen as a threat to public order and racial survival.
In The riddle of the travelling skull a character called Sandy McDougall appears. He is a ‘negro’ janitor, (the language reflects the time, 1934, when the book was written), who has been ‘officially proclaimed by two psychologists to be a moron’. Sandy McDougall’s employer would always hide him ‘in the basement for a few days whenever the usual moron-roundings-up took place.’ Yet Sandy McDougall was also a world jigsaw champion who had put together a 5,000 piece jigsaw eight hours faster than any other competitor. He uses that skill to help the main character put back together, in lightning time, some shredded papers that help to solve the mystery at the heart of the plot.
Idiots Valley
It is typical of Keeler that just when you think you are being presented with a stereotype, as in the case of Sandy MacDougall (or Ah Hell the Chinese laundryman) he makes them do or say things that completely subvert your opinions. In his later books there is a region called Idiots Valley, populated entirely by inbred ‘idiot’ people, most of them packing guns.
It is a brilliant satire on the eugenic fears about the degenerate idiot population that caused such hysteria in the USA for most of the 20th century. Idiots Valley is referred to in one of his last books, The case of the two-headed idiot, where the fate of two-headed ‘retarded’ Siamese twins who have been retired from a freak show becomes entwined with a plot involving Chinese laundries and Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat.
Keeler is not to everyone’s taste. He shocks his readers deliberately, and mocks all the conventions of thriller writing. He is however also very funny and a skilled story teller. In his bizarre world there was also plenty of space, sympathy and appreciation for those who were not seen as ‘fit’ by the ‘normal’ world. That included ‘idiots’, whether they had two heads or one.
