REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:
HARRY STEPHEN KEELER – The Mysterious Mr. I. Dutton, hardcover, 1938.
It appears ludicrous to debate Harry Stephen Keeler as a deep, metaphysical writer on the order of Kafka or Genet. The truth is, it’s ludicrous, and I’m not going to try it. I simply need to level out that for a author typically dismissed, even by his admirers, as “wacky,” he touches on some advanced and unsettling themes.
I believe the salient level of Keeler’s writing is its intensely Dickensian high quality. His work on characters like Xenious Jones, Christopher Thorne, Casimir Jech and Simon Grund of the Lincoln Faculty for the Feeble Minded, irresistibly reminds one of many creativeness and care that Dickens put into Uriah Heep, Fagin, Macawber et al. Nor ought to one overlook Dickens’ penchant for tangled interrelationships and the event wild coincidence.
Having made that time, I believe it finest forgotten. Keeler’s love (one would possibly nearly name it a fetish) for these components, although it constitutes a lot of the allure of his work, has been totally an excessive amount of the main target of his admirers and detractors.
With out denying this appreciable allure, I’d like to contemplate among the much less obvious underpinnings of a few of his books.
The eponymous narrator of The Mysterious Mr. I guides the e book via one thing that’s not a lot a plot as a collection of brief tales. Or possibly they’re fragments of novels, since every appears to have began lengthy earlier than his intrusion into it. We first meet him on a Chicago road nook, holding a cranium below his arm. We comply with him via an odd procession of introductions during which he meets whole strangers, convinces them that they’re acquainted with him, and causes six suicides just by telling among the strangers what he is aware of about their responsible pasts.
Wacky, sure, however grim. Like a Max Fliescher Cartoon. All through the e book, there’s something that might be known as a plot, in regards to the seek for an escaped maniac and a scheme to defraud “I” of a fortune that he doesn’t have. Keeler just about ignores it, and, in truth leaves it unresolved on the finish, together with I’s true id.
To be continued …
— Reprinted from A Shropshire Sleuth #4, Might 1982.
