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Published Sunday, Dec. 7
PAINFUL PROSE IS OUT THERE FOR THE TAKING
Q: Why are all the novels of Harry Stephen Keeler out of print?
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A: Well I guess I should point out that Keeler's novels are not completely out of print. Ramble House has 72 Keeler titles in print (for more information, go to www.ramblehouse.com). That's 68 more than J.K. Rowling has.
No English-language publisher has printed any of Keeler's work in conventional form for many years. Toward the end of his life, Keeler could get published only in Spanish and Portuguese. His last novel in English appeared in 1953. He was published regularly in Spain until 1967, and a Czech translation of his Sing Sing Nights was printed as recently as 1999.
What you probably mean is why did Keeler go out of print and remain out of print for so long? Keeler came out of the tradition of Agatha Christie-style puzzle mysteries. From the 1930s onward, tastes shifted toward the grittier, faster-paced, more-realistic fiction of people like Chandler and Hammett. Keeler was never one to cater to the public's tastes. During the same period, Keeler's novels became stranger, longer, less "realistic," and at times verged on science fiction. His narrative techniques were equally
odd. That made Keeler a hard sell for publishers.
Why did he fall out of favor? Maybe this quotation from The Monocled Monster (1947) will answer the question:
"Since it had been brought by her so belatedly with respect to his departure, use it Barry Wayne had not even bothered to do, for fully dressed he already had been by then – and combed, as well, through the sense of feel also, had been his hair."
Let's say that the number of people who appreciated Keeler's increasingly bizarre and painful prose swiftly diminished.
To learn even more, Mr. Smarty Pants interviewed Fender Tucker, who runs Ramble House and makes Keeler's books by hand. "Harry himself said that the reason why he wasn't appreciated was because he refused to write bedroom scenes that were all the rage in the late Forties when Mickey Spillane was getting popular," says Tucker. "And he did, probably just out of spite, try to break all of the rules laid down by S.S. Van Dine and others about how a good mystery ought to be constructed."
Tucker says Keeler had no interest in action writing. "If his plot involved a bank robber stealing a truck and killing dozens of people while being chased through the Grand Canyon by autogiros, you can bet that Harry would present this in his book as two old men in a business office talking about it 10 years down the road. And it would take up eight chapters."
If you want, you can download a few of his pieces from the Harry Stephen Keeler Appreciation Society Web site at keelersociety.mondoplex.com
under the link for Keeler e-texts. (Special thanks to Richard Polt and William Poundstone for their help with this answer.)
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