Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Still another of his stocks-in-trade was a positive Dickensian flare for endowing his characters with unusual names—so unusual in some instances that they are downright chucklesome. Here are just a few of his more inspired noms-d’absurdité:

  Rudolph “Blue-Bow” Ballmeier (lawyer)

  Nyland “Golden-Tongue” Finfrock (lawyer)

  Mulchrone KixMiller (writer)

  Mingleberry Hepp (writer)

  Charley Squat-in-Thunderstorm (Indian)

  Ebenezer Sitting-Down-Bear (Negro Indian)

  “Poke-Nose” Hohoff (reporter)

  Judge Fishkins Dollarhide

  Count Ritzenditzendorfer

  Pfaff Hufnagel

  Bucyrus Duckstone

  Hutchcock McDolphus

  Isdale Archdeacon

  Bogardus Sandsteel

  Ochiltree Jark

  Balhatchet Barkstone

  Jeronymo Ashpital

  MacAngus MacWhiffle

  Abner Hopfear

  Oswald Sweetboy

  Joe Czescziczki

  Maltby Lawhead

  Scientifico Greenlimb

  As for his characters, they are like no other in fiction. Their speech, relationships, and behavior are so bizarre that they might exist on another planet only approximating Earth—a planet where freaks and screwball ethnic minorities abound, mostly for the amusement of the “normal” white majority. Keeler thought nothing of introducing a major character one hundred pages or more into a novel, or of totally abandoning a major protagonist two-thirds of the way through one. He also thought nothing of using an object rather than a person as a novel’s main character. A mythical rare book of Chinese aphorisms entitled The Way Out—a book, we are told, that contains “all the collated wisdom of the Chinese race”—gets people into and out of hot water in five novels published between 1941 and 1944: The Peacock Fan, The Sharkskin Book, The Book with the Orange Leaves, The Case of the Two Strange Ladies, and The Case of the 16 Beans (the “Chinese fable” mentioned above is supposedly from The Way Out). About his “Way Out” stories, Keeler once said that he “had a hell of a damned time trying to slant each to a bit of Chinese wisdom and then write the bit of wisdom to fit the story. I had to be brief, pungent, Chinese in flavor and where possible, with a bit of humor. And I nearly busted my cerebellum making them up.” Those who read the “Way Out” stories, in particular The Case of the 16 Beans, may be inclined to believe that Keeler did indeed bust his cerebellum in making them up.

  Gangsters run rampant in his novels—toughs with such names as Al “Three-Gun” Mulhearn, Two-Gun “Polack” Eddy, Louis Rocco, Scarf ace Scalisi, and Driller O’Hare. Most of the nonethnic ones speak in a strange, slangy patois that would have had Dutch Schultz and the boys, had they ever read any of it, out of their chairs and convulsed on the floor. For instance:

  “2 and 2’s [statistics] collected by this lone hustler through casing the court convictions over 20 years shows that in 81 percent of acquittals there’s always one hustler that’s well heeled with scratch, and conversely 76 percent of convictions shows a mob without a cent of coin back of anybody. And why am I handing you this fakealoo? Because, Kid, always work in a mob where there’s one geezer handsome-heeled; in catching the best mouthpiece money can buy he has 81 percent chance of a kiss-off from the jury. Then you’ll catch his kiss-off at the same time, 2 and 2’s, boy, are never a shill.” (The Green Jade Hand)

  “Okay! Ask ’em, then—one question each—and one only—and in a low voice—because any minute now he’ll be up on this level [of the building]. And I don’t want nobody’s bazooing to drown out his approach. For I want him safe in here—beyond all three doors and beyond yonder bolt—so’s I can be putting that rod on his spine and letting him know it’s a snatch.” (The Case of the 16 Beans)

  Ethnic characters, gangsters and otherwise, also run rampant in Keelerland. As Nevins says, “Everyone in a Keeler novel, including the hero and the heroine and even Keeler himself in the third-person narrative portions, is a blatant racist; every conceivable race and nationality is systematically and uproariously libelled over and over again.” But in spite of this, Nevins contends, Keeler was not in fact a racist: “[He] knew he lived in a racist society, knew that he couldn’t do a thing to change it, hated rascism deeply, but refused to be solemn about the subject and insisted on his right to express himself in a way that could be misinterpreted.” Nevins bases his defense of his hero on a handful of scenes, characters, and plot elements in the Keeler canon; but the overwhelming volume—and not-occasional viciousness—of racial slurs, jokes, and stereotyping also to be found in the canon would seem to make that defense insupportable. Harry Stephen may not have been a card-carrying white supremicist, but neither was he an advocate of the NAACP or the Italian Anti-Defamation League. At best his racial attitudes might have been ambivalent.

  Not only did he and his WASP characters regularly refer to ethnics as “niggers,” “wops,” “Hunkies,” “Heines,” “Chinks,” and so forth, but anyone and everyone with an ethnic surname was made to speak in some of the most shamelessly awful dialect ever committed to paper. In such novels as The Vanishing Gold Truck and The Case of the 16 Beans, dialect of one kind and another takes over the narrative and goes on for page after page after page, until the deciphering of all the elided, bastardized, and phonetically misspelled words becomes a mind-numbing chore to tax the patience of the most dedicated cryptographer. Any reader who attempts to pursue either of these titles (and a few others) would do well to lay in a supply of Excedrin-Plus before beginning.

  Here are a few illustrations of Keeler’s brand of ethnic dialect, all from The Case of the 16 Beans:

  Black: “An’ he say, kinda jokin’ lak, ‘Soun’ to me lak dey’s a Shylock Home aroun’ dis place—on’y he is a punk Shylock Home, ‘kaze he don’t obsarve nothin’. Now huccombe, Shylock Home, Ah could go ‘way downtown to Six’ Ab’noo yistidday, wid you traipsin’ all obah Alb’ny? Somebody hatter tek keah dis house, an’ get de th’ee ‘potent tel’phone calls I ‘uz ‘spectic’, an’ dat somebody wuz me! W’y, Ah lak to have die wid bo’dom.’ Den ob co’se Ah say, stubbo’n lak—’kaze I ‘uz puzzle ‘bout dem 16 seeds—’Well, ‘twuz day befo’ yistidday, den, dat you wuz dere.’ An’ he grunt an’ say: ‘Seem lak Ah cain’t call my own doin’s mah own in dis town! An’ he add: Yassuh, Shylock Home, ’twuz day befo’ yistidday, an’ Ah picked up a crooked pin on Broadway an’ buyed mahse’f a malted milk on Fo’th Ab’noo—now you know ebberting ‘bout my movements. Is you satisfied? If not, whut else mebbe you lak know?’”

  Chinese: “Gleetings, Mistel Palladine. I makee big mistook las’ ni’te, w’en I sellee you sholt shoestlings, ‘stead of long shoestlings like you wan’. But I no likee bothel you this molnin’ fo’ to le’ me extsange—you plob’ly lots busy in molnin’s, yes, no?—but allee lite!—come I now, aftel you’ lunch, to makee extsange.”

  German: “Bod afder dot, Roggo, vy nod we boomp him off ride avay? Unt schnake his potty oud-d-d-d tonide bevore—?”

  Sicilian: “Bot wance we catch thoz’ ransome monee, Loo-ee—you no mebbe gonna try order us for to mak’ beeg scatter—weeth heem knowin’ ‘oo we are.”

  Keeler’s narrative prose is often enough in the same headache-inducing category. Art Scott says that his style is “florid, gramatically knock-kneed”; and so it is. It may also be described as a savory goulash of Edwardian verbosity mixed with the color purple, spiced with slangy words and phrases both generic and Keelerian, and leavened by jawbreaking sentences and confounding paragraphs of such awesome composition as

  Not only had the safe quite evidently been cast in days before the modern combination dial had been thought of, but it had moreover been through a fierce fire at some far-gone day, for its door was warped as though the most intense of flames had played over the entire mass of metal, and it could be seen that the door no longer fitted snugly into the framework machined for it. Indeed, it was evident that the very lock itself
must have melted in those flames, and that the original owner had had to chisel away both lock and site to operate the single sliding bolt and gain access to the charred remains of his papers and, perhaps, Civil War currency, for a square of powerful steel containing a single milled slot—literally a section of armor plate a half-inch thick—had been riveted by four rivets over the site of the old lockwork; and that newer, and no doubt more thief-proof, mechanism had been installed in the open orifice back of this steel plate was indicated by the long-stemmed but powerful key which Jech at last succeeded in extracting through his shirt-bosom to the extent that the long leather thong holding it around his neck permitted, for the key’s complicated notches and prongs suggested from the extreme intricacy of their pattern that if the safe and lock makers of several decades back could not construct an impregnable strongbox, they could at least create an unpickable lock. (The Green Jade Hand)

  Ironically he gazed at himself—gay, yet penniless, bird of plummage as he was—with his striking driver’s costume of short-sleeved green flannel shirt, belted into black trousers with red stripes on edges, the legs of the latter buckled into shin-high thong-laced yellow cowhide boots, his short bullwhip—mere symbol, no more, of old circus-wagon days—swinging, by a snap-catch, from his side; then tilting back on his head the flat broad-brimmed Australian-like grey hat, with brim rolled up on one side, that was part and parcel of the costume, he swung his troubled gaze in a great arc across the desolate countryside region where the wagon stood—a region of uncultivable knolls, becoming apparently bigger and bigger toward the south, or left of him, with here and there, in all directions, patches of malignant-looking weeds, and here and there, too, clusters of scrub oak—and more patches, like actual woods of the same, in the distance, left, right, and forward—and no fences anywhere, because of apparently nothing that had to be kept in or out; after which troubled surveyal, he dourly regarded the lonely store that stood off from his wagon. (The Vanishing Gold Truck) Glumly he gazed out of the broad window next to the capacious chair in which he sat, which looked down on the morning traffic pouring, this sunny June morning, past 47th and Broadway, far far below, then, withdrawing his gaze, he contemplated himself glumly, across the thickly green carpeted and mahogany-furnished office, in the cheval mirror fastened to the closet door in the opposite wall, seeing only, however, just a young man of 28 or so, with steel grey eyes, who, not so terribly long ago, as it seemed to him, had been wearing a blue naval coast patrol uniform, but who today, now that the war was over and gone, was dressed in a brisk pepper-and-salt suit, and four-in-hand tie with a colorful plaid of just such a degree as the modern New Yorker might safely wear. (The Case of the 16 Beans)

  Harry Stephen’s fine hand with ethnic dialogue has already been demonstrated. Here is an example of how he handled more conventional dialogue between two supposedly intelligent WASP characters—and of his unique method of dispensing pertinent facts to the reader through colloquy.

  “What on earth do you mean, Boyce? About knowing ‘smart-alecky wisecracks’—and handing them out free gratis? Just because you’ve run your grandfather’s poky, stodgy little real-estate business for 6 years, there at the 242nd Street station of the Broadway Subway—or 6 years minus your year-and-a-quarter time out while serving on that Navy coast patrol vessel—doesn’t mean you can’t speak—as a young man might—any longer. Real-estate men aren’t supposed to be old fogies, are they? And besides, the matter has nothing whatsoever to do with your grandfather’s will, so far as I see it.”

  “Oh, no?” was Boyce Barkstone’s sepulchral rejoinder, the while he gazed oddly, in turn, at the other. “Well, listen to this little incident then. . . . The last time I saw Grandfather alive—which, according to the date on this will, was the morning of the day he drew the will—I said, inadvertently, and not knowing I was addressing him—it was a beastly comedy of errors, understand—a ghastly mistake—a case of—of two other men, as you might put it—anyway, I said to him—inadvertently and unwittingly: ‘Nuts to you, you old fool!’” (The Case of the 16 Beans)

  But it is not in his prose that Keeler’s real genius lies; it is in his plots. Most of them defy synopsizing at any but great length. Some defy synopsizing at any length, among them such massive single-volume works as The Box from Japan (1932, 765 pages) and Finger, Finger! (1938, 536 pages). At 360,000 words, The Box from Japan is the longest single-volume mystery novel in the English language—a book which Keeler himself, with puckish humor, described as “perfectly adapted to jack up a truck with.”

  What I can do to give you an idea of the nature of his web-work plots is to list the essential characters and plot ingredients in some of the more memorable ones. Keep in mind that these are the essential, not the only ones, and that they interrelate and interlock by means of manipulation, massive coincidence, and all manner of literary pyrotechnics.

  The Green Jade Hand (1930)

  A stolen book of exquisite rarity and value, the “De Devinis Institutionalibus Adversum Gentes” a.k.a. the “Vindelinus de Spira,” which likewise bears the weighty title of Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius and which was published and bound by Wendelin of Speier in 1472; a couple of unscrupulous Chicago bibliophiles; a venal—and deaf—curio shop owner named Casimer Jech; an excon cracksman whose entire savings of over three hundred dollars (earned by working extra hours in the machine shop at Joliet) is stolen on the day he is released from prison; a panhandling hobo who finds a tiny, carved, six-fingered green jade hand in a bowl of chop suey; two “colored women safeblowers” who turn out to be former circus acrobats and “strong-arm women” once known as the Indian Sisters from Rangoon; a conniving Cleveland rooming-house owner called Sadie Hippolyte; “the biggee king of Chinatown,” Wah Hung Fung; the only male descendant of a master jade-carver of the Ming dynasty, who happens to be an embezzler of bank bills and unregistered American Liberty Bonds; another Chinese thief, this one a coolie with a cork leg; a pair of young Caucasian lovers named Dirk and Iolanthe, Dirk being the inventor of the Mattox Noiseless Platen for typewriters; Iolanthe’s long-lost black-sheep brother; a feeble-minded police-station janitor, Simon Grundt, who fancies himself a great detective; a foppish, eccentric “scientific investigator,” Oliver Oliver (a.k.a. “old Double-O”), who is fond of “exposing his super-brilliant private detective badge” to cab drivers, among others; a bejeweled bracelet in the form of a golden snake with its tail in its mouth; a thousand-year-old Chinese book entitled The Sayings of Tu Fu (a forerunner of The Way Out); a weird reward offered by the Bohemian Society of Chicago and matched by the Archeological Museum of Evanston, Illinois, involving the determination of a person’s sex; a scheme to raise funds for a plainclothes policemen’s ball at the Fireman’s Hall (?) by selling tickets to a bogus investigation conducted by a half-wit inside a murdered man’s shop; a “diabolical burglar trap”; some crackpot police work, based on all sorts of illogical and erroneous assumptions; and the most outrageous, vaudevillean (literally) unmasking-of-a-“murderer” scene in all of crime fiction.

  The Man with the Magic Eardrums (1939)

  A rich Minneapolis racetrack bookie, Mortimer Q. King, a.k.a. “Square-Shooter” King, a.k.a. “Camera-Shy” King, who is ostensibly married to a well-to-do ex-Southern belle but who is actually married to “the world’s most notorious Negress” as the result of a “noxious lost chapter” in his life; the degenerate Negress, Jemimah Cobb, owner and operator of a London whorehouse populated by freaks (a woman with seven fingers on each hand, a female Quasimodo), who is presently awaiting the hangman’s noose in Pentonville Prison, London, for murdering her rich Chinese lover, Mock Lu, and who has vowed to reveal, as soon as she steps onto the gallows, the identity of the white American to whom she is legally married “as a revenge against the entire white race”; the baffling “Mulkovitch Riddle,” in which a bearded Russian was known definitely to walk into Jemimah’s dive but never to have walked out again, with no trace of him having turned up when the police shortly after
ward searched the place; King’s present wife, Laurel, who is on a three-day “novena” in sackcloth and ashes, praying for her dead father, Catholic prayer-book publisher Ignatius van Utley, in the Convent of St. Etheldreda in Milwaukee; a burglar named Peter Givney, whom King catches trying to break and enter his home and who wears a pair of artificial eardrums called the Cromely Micro-acoustic Sound-Focusing Auricles; a freak in the manufacture of these hearing aids which provides Givney with supersensitive hearing that enables him to open burglar-proof safes, not to mention “hear a lady fly sighing after her gent fly has kissed her [and] a dago eating spaghetti in Naples”; a telephone call and eventual visit from a Buffalo lawyer who offers to buy a human skull King uses as a good-luck talisman; a “Senatorial Investigation Toward Abolishment by Federal Statute of All Race-Track Booking in America, by Machine, Oral and All Other Recording Devices or Systems”; a lawsuit brought by a Chinese laundry man against the Buffalo Trust and Savings Bank, claiming he owns the land under their skyscraper; a Polish doctor, Stefan Sciecinskiwicz, who has been dating King’s maid and who is the brother of a “notorious mankiller” called Two-Gun “Polack” Eddy; the human skull (Mr. Skull, King calls it), which was given to Mortimer by a Wisconsin farmer who dug it up in one of his fields and which he (King) has loaned out to a friend for a pre-Halloween party; some other gangsters, one of whom is a one-eyed gigolo named Blinky who is beheaded by his pals; some dazzling legalistics and some even more dazzling misinformation about the effects of marijuana cigarettes (e.g. “If you smoke one, atop any kind of alcohol—let alone absinthe—you’ll just tell your whole family history”); a limping, simple-minded Negro window washer; a short story written by still another gangster, this one known as “Big Shoes,” who is trying to crack the New York fiction markets; a train called “the famous Minneapolis-Chicago Non-Stop Perishable Through Freight”; a seven-foot traffic cop; one hundred thousand dollars in diamonds; a racehorse named Who-Was-Greta-Garbo; a British Negro odds-figurer known variously as “Horses,” “Milkwagon,” and “The Clock”; an old gentlemen who secretly collects emeralds; a disgruntled exnewspaperman who broke into the Multi Connection Room of the new Minneapolis Telephone Exchange, threw a switch ringing at least half a million Minneapolis telephone bells, and then delivered a speech stating that each subscriber was to be named Jemimah Cobb’s white American husband; an explanation of the Mulkovitch Riddle that involves transvestitism and a bearded lady; and a perfect deus ex machina resolution of Mortimer King’s problems with Jemimah and her vow to expose him. All of this takes place over the course of a single night, inside King’s Minneapolis home, and is told primarily through dialogue.