The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Here are some typical Keeler situations. In The Man with the Magic Eardrums (1939), a disgruntled former phone company employee calls every man in Minneapolis, informing each of them that the morning newspapers will name him as the secret husband of the convicted murderess Jemimah Cobb, who runs a brothel specializing in women with physical abnormalities.

  In The Spectacles of Mr Cagliostro (1929), the main character, thanks to a mysterious clause in a Will, is obliged to wear a pair of hideous blue glasses continuously for a whole year so that he will eventually be able to see a secret message that is visible only with the blue glasses.

  In The Case of the Transparent Nude (1958), a woman’s body vanishes while she taking a steam bath. Her head and toes remain, sticking out of the steam cabinet, with only her torso missing.

  Woe to readers who think they might be able to guess the ending. In Keeler’s crime thrillers, the character who will be revealed as the guilty party is usually introduced, for the first time, near – if not actually on – the last page of the book. In X Jones of Scotland Yard (1936), a man is found dead, apparently strangled, in the middle of his lawn, but there are no footprints other than his own. The police have a suspect, the “flying Strangler Baby”, a homicidal midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter; in last sentence of the last page of this 448-page story, Keeler reveals that Napoleon Bonaparte is the culprit.

  His special talent was not confined to surreal plot lines. His characters have names like Criorcan Mulqueeny, Screamo the Clown, Scientifico Greenlimb, Wolf Gladish and State Attorney Foxhart Cubycheck. His prose is largely indecipherable. Here is a sample passage from The Case of the 16 Beans:

  The door now opened, revealing, as it did so, a strange figure – a half-man, no less, seated on a “rollerskate” cart! – framed against the bit of outer hallway. But no ordinary half-man this, for he was a Chinaman; quite legless, indeed, so far as the presence of even upper leg stumps went; but amply provided with locomotion, of the gliding kind, anyway, in the matter of the unusually generous rubber-tired wheels under the platform cart.

  Many of Keeler’s works were colossal, including the 741-page The Matilda Hunter Murder (1931), which followed the exploits of Tuddleton T. Trotter, a patron of homeless cats; and The Box from Japan (1932), which ran to 765 pages. Not so much un-put-downable as un-pick-upable.

  In the mid-1930s, Keeler briefly enjoyed cult status. His popularity peaked when his book Sing Sing Nights (1933) was loosely used in a low-budget B-movie, as was The Mysterious Mr Wong (1935), starring the screen legend Bela Lugosi. During this time, Keeler was also the editor of Ten Story Book, a popular pulp short-story magazine that included photos of nude and scantily clad young women. He filled the spaces between the stories with frequent plugs for his own books, as well as illustrations by his wife.

  After his initial popularity, Keeler’s writing style grew increasingly more baroque. In the late 1930s, he removed almost all of the action and presented it through page after page of impenetrable dialogue. For example, The Portrait of Jirjohn Cobb (1940), described affectionately by the Harry Keeler Appreciation Society as “one of the most astoundingly unreadable novels ever written”, comprises four characters, two talking in a strange unfathomable dialect, sitting on an island in the middle of a river, talking and listening to a radio. This goes on for hundreds of pages.

  By the early 1940s, even his most dogged fans had given up. After exhausting the patience of two or three English language publishers, he continued to publish in Spanish and Portuguese. When those outlets also dried up, he carried on writing anyway. The New York Times noted, “We are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.”

  Keeler died in his sleep on 22 January 1967, leaving a dozen books unfinished, confident that one day he’d be read again. He has been vindicated; today his spirit lives on on websites, a bi-monthly newsletter devoted to him and a small publishing house systematically issuing his complete works, including several never published in his lifetime. (See Keeler’s Bibliography in Appendix I.)

  Least Perceptive Creator of Character with Superhuman Powers of Perception

  You couldn’t put one past Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Unlike his famous fictional detective, rational, deductive reasoning was not Conan Doyle’s thing. In fact, he was a credulous dupe for all kinds of pseudo-science and trickery. When he wasn’t writing about world’s most logical detective, in his spare time he was lecturing on life after death, automatic writing, spirit photography and ectoplasm, as well as publishing books of predictions from his wife’s spirit guide, Pheneas.

  He also had an unlikely friendship with the American showman and escapologist Harry Houdini, who had once made a fully grown elephant vanish from the stage of the New York Hippodrome; he’d also escaped from locked boxes, wriggled out of a straitjacket while dangling from a crane and once spent an hour-and-a-half in an iron coffin submerged at the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Conan Doyle devoted a whole chapter of his book The Edge of the Unknown to Houdini, making a detailed argument that he had genuine psychic powers, although Houdini made no such claims for himself. He once showed Conan Doyle and his wife the simple children’s party trick of apparently removing the top of his thumb. Lady Conan Doyle swooned at the sight and her husband later wrote to Houdini congratulating him on his “amazing demonstration of supernatural powers”.

  Houdini was prepared to overlook his friend’s gullibility until a bizarre incident in 1922. Conan Doyle developed an interest in spiritualism after the death of his eldest son in the First World War, and it became something of an obsession. He invited Houdini to attend a séance conducted by Lady Conan Doyle, during which she “communicated” with Houdini’s recently deceased mother. Lady Conan Doyle told Houdini that his late departed mum sent her seasonal Christmas greetings. As Houdini’s mother was Jewish, her first words from the other side were unlikely to be “Merry Christmas, son”. Moreover, as she spoke only Yiddish, it was even more unlikely that she and Lady Conan Doyle would have had much of a conversation. Mrs Houdini also neglected to mention the coincidence that it was her birthday. After that, Houdini’s relationship with Conan Doyle turned into a full-blown public feud as he publicly denounced Lady Conan Doyle as a fraud.

  In spite of the battering his reputation had taken, Conan Doyle’s belief in spiritualism remained firmly intact,7 but that was the least of it. He also believed in fairies.

  In the summer of 1917, a ten-year-old girl named Frances Griffiths was on holiday in the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire. Her favourite game was messing about beside the stream at the bottom of the garden with her sixteen-year-old cousin Elsie Wright. When Frances returned home soaking wet one day, her mother demanded to know what she had been up to. “Playing with fairies,” was the child’s answer. To prove it, she borrowed her father’s camera. The next time she came back from the stream she had pictures, taken by her cousin, of Frances in the garden with several fairies dancing in front of her. There was another with Frances and a gnome sitting on the hem of her dress. In total, there were five magical Cottingley photos.

  A few weeks later Elsie’s mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society8 in Bradford. The lecture that evening was on “Fairy Life” and she happened to mention the pictures. Word spread and, in 1920, Conan Doyle got to hear about them.

  Coincidentally, at the time the photographs surfaced, he was writing an article about fairies for the Christmas edition of The Strand Magazine. He saw the fairy pictures and was very impressed. Just to be certain of their authenticity, he sought the opinion of a couple of photographic experts. First, he showed them to the photographic company Ilford, who reported unequivocally that there was “some evidence of faking”. The technicians at Kodak said the pictures showed no signs of having been faked, but declined to issue a
certificate of authenticity. He then sought a third opinion from the famous physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, who believed the photographs to be fake, on account of the fairies’ “distinctly ‘Parisienne’” hairstyles. None of this seems to have bothered Canon Doyle, who promptly declared them genuine and stuck to his guns in the face of considerable mockery.

  So convinced was he that he even wrote a book – The Coming of Fairies – in which he lays out the story of the photographs, their supposed provenance and the implications of their existence.9 He wasn’t in the least troubled by the fact that the fairy wings in the photographs never showed signs of blurred movement, even in the picture of the fairy calmly posed suspended in mid-air. Apparently, fairy wings don’t work like the wings of a hummingbird.

  Elsie Wright stuck to her story until 1983, when her “fairies” were found in a 1915 children’s anthology. Only then did the 83-year-old woman admit she had copied the pictures, glued them on to a bit of cardboard and fixed them on some nearby bushes with hat-pins. The great Conan Doyle, creator of the most rational fictional character of all time, had been taken in by a 16-year-old girl with a pot of glue.

  Most Pointless Literary Hoax

  In 1902, Montgomery Carmichael, a member of the British consular service in Italy and the author of a number of European travel books, went to his publishers with what seemed at first to be a proposal for a straightforward biography.

  He explained that he had been left in the Will of a friend, Philip Walshe, a large and extraordinary collection of valuable manuscripts. They were the works of his father, the late Mr John William Walshe, who died on 2 July 1900, aged sixty-three, at Assisi, Umbria, where he had spent the latter half of his life. Mr Walshe, he explained, was well known to scholars as perhaps the greatest living authority on the Franciscan order of monks. It was duly published as The Life of John William Walshe.

  It was only some time later that someone pointed out that the name of Walshe does not figure in any actual list of Franciscan scholars, living or dead. The Life of John William Walshe was the detailed portrait of a man who had never existed. The work was an elaborate hoax.

  Librarian Edmund Lester Pearson called it “one of the most inexplicable examples of the literary hoax . . . it contained not one atom of satire, it was not a parody, and so far as I, at least, could have discovered by internal evidence, it was what it purported to be: a sober and reverent biography of an Englishman dwelling in Italy, a devout member of the Church of Rome, and in particular an enthusiastic student and pious follower of St Francis of Assisi.”

  Carmichael never offered an explanation for perpetrating the hoax.

  “My biggest fear is that we will be too successful.”

  Walt Disney chairman Robert Fitzpatrick on the opening of Disneyland Paris 1992. Over twenty years later, it has amassed losses of €1.9 billion and, according to financial experts, may never turn a profit.

  Worst Published Author

  “I expect I will be talked about at the end of 1,000 years.”

  Amanda McKittrick Ros

  Almost anyone can knock out a bad book, but to achieve fame and adulation for doing it takes a certain kind of genius.

  The Irish author Amanda McKittrick Ros (or to give her adopted pen name – Amanda Malvina Fitzalan Anna Margaret McClelland McKittrick Ros) was born Anna Margaret McKittrick in 1860 to a middle-class Presbyterian family in Ballynahinch, County Down, Ireland. From 1884, she trained as a schoolteacher at Marlborough Training College, Dublin, and got her first full teaching post at Larne where she met her future husband, the local stationmaster, Andrew Ross. She dropped the second “s” of Ross to suggest a non-existent association with a noble family called de Ros from County Down.

  She was in her thirties when she discovered that she had a gift for, in her own words, “disturbing the bowels” with a unique style which she attributed to never having read anything. Under the impression that authors always paid for the printing of their works, in 1897 she persuaded her husband to have her first novel Irene Iddesleigh produced as a wedding anniversary present. A tragic tale of an unhappy marriage and the doom that inevitably follows, it introduced to the world her unique use of language. Nothing is ever described in a straightforward way. For example, “needlework” became “the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness”. The critic Northrop Frye described her prose as “a kind of literary diabetes”. In this passage, the hero Sir John remonstrates with Irene because she is cold towards him:

  Irene, if I may use such familiarity, I have summoned you hither, it may be to undergo a stricter examination than your present condition probably permits; but knowing, as you should, my life must be miserable under this growing cloud of unfathomed dislike, I became resolved to end, if within my power, such contentious and unlady-like conduct as that practised by you towards me of late. It is now six months – yea, weary months – since I shielded you from open penury and insult, which were bound to follow you, as well as your much-loved protectors, who sheltered you from the pangs of penniless orphanage; and during these six months, which naturally should have been the pet period of nuptial harmony, it has proved the hideous period of howling dislike!

  Nobody took much notice of Irene Iddesleigh until, by chance, the humourist and critic Barry Pain got hold of a copy and wrote a mocking review in the magazine Black in White calling it “the book of the century”.

  When Amanda Ros read the review, she was deeply hurt. From that moment, she came to regard critics in general, and Pain in particular, as her mortal enemies – or, as she called them, “evil-minded snapshots of spleen”.10 Without Pain’s review, it is likely that she would have slid into obscurity, but thanks to his efforts she established a cult following among connoisseurs of bad taste. London’s literary élite threw Amanda McKittrick Ros parties at which they would take it in turns to recite favourite passages.

  Meanwhile, she was hard at work on her second novel Delina Delaney, a larger and more ambitious effort, twice as long as Irene Iddesleigh and populated with a wider cast of characters, including the unforgettable Madam-de-Maine. Like her first effort, it was published privately in 1898. Much of it remains impervious to comprehension. See what you make of the opening lines:

  Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

  Parts of Delina Delaney were made even more inaccessible by being written in an obscure Irish dialect known only to the author. In this extract, Delina’s mother hears of the engagement of her daughter to Lord Gifford:

  Raising her hands above her head, Mrs Delaney first looked at her daughter, then at Lord Gifford, saying, “Father ive saints! is it thrue dthat mac poor choild has tuk lave ive hur sinses buy pramisin’ ta be dthe woife ive our koind an’ good landlady’s son, an’ hur jist dthe offspring ive poor Joe Delaney-a poor old fisherman?”

  In 1908, she inherited some property from a friend, much to the resentment of her neighbours with whom she had fallen out; she liked to remind them that she was a direct descendant of King Sitric of Denmark. The Will was ambiguous in certain parts, which led to a great deal of legal wranglings. Inevitably, lawyers joined Amanda’s hate-list. Of one she wrote:

  Readers, did you ever hear

  Of Mickey Monkeyface McBlear?

  His snout is long with a flattish top,

  Lined inside with a slimy crop:

  His mouth like a slit in a money box,

  Portrays his kindred to a fox.

  Her next work, Poems of Puncture, was largely an invective against lawyers and an effort intended to recoup some of the money she had lost in legal costs.

  In 1914, Ros decided to beco
me a war poet and limited her output to patriotic gems which she had printed and distributed to soldiers and sailors billeted in Larne. “A Little Belgian Orphan” includes this description of supposed German atrocities:

  Just then they raised the little lad and threw him on the fire

  And wreathed in smiles they watched him burn until he did expire . . .

  In another she tells some soldiers:

  We know you’ll do your duty and come to little harm And if you meet the Kaiser, cut off his other arm.

  In 1917, her husband of thirty years fell ill and died. At his funeral, she snubbed various mourners by ordering the funeral hearse to move off at a trot and leave them stranded behind. She then went through the wreaths and those she didn’t like were dispatched back to their donors.

  For a while, she ran a couple of shops from her house, “Iddesleigh”, but the business venture failed, mainly due to her local unpopularity. Fortunately, she met and married a well-off farmer and, from that time on, was financially secure and able devote herself to her writing. For the next few years, in between attacks on the English language, she issued a torrent of mostly abusive verse on her pet subjects – lawyers, fashion, the Kaiser, the abandonment of moral standards, clerics and critics, whom she called “scribblers of thick witted type”. Her intense hatred on these themes found its way into nearly all her works, whether relevant to the story or not.