Riddle of the Travelling Skull (1934), The White Circle (1954)
Book Reviews | Feb 16th, 2007
Author: Harry Stephen Keeler
Publisher: Ramble House
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 0
Retail Price: 0.00
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Harry Stephen Keeler was one of the world’s most unusual writers, whose books have been denounced by critics as unreadable and insane (and his cult following gleefully agrees). In his time, he was pigeon-holed as a mystery writer and achieved some commercial success in the 30s with a couple of legible and logical mystery novels.
He then vanished from the literary scene’s radar, though he continued to churn out dozens of books for decades. His novels quickly drifted away from the conventional form and into a stories-within-stories structure and his fascinating “webworks”, whereby he would mold the plot around strings of implausible and illogical coincidences, all of which mesh toward a stunning conclusion. (To create a webwork, he’d randomly pick out a half dozen news articles from a file cabinet, then write plot threads that connect them all.)
His body of work is absolutely astounding, and as his posthumous reputation grows, tons of people clued into the coolness of Keeler are scrambling to find his books. A longtime Keeler fan, Fender Tucker formed Ramble House, a small publisher in the bayous of Louisiana, with the mission to bring every word of Keeler back into print.
The White Circle, written in 1954 and published in Spain in 1965, has until now, yet to be published in English, and this edition will be the first read by many Keeler fans. The White Circle is also the first of his “Ramble House” series, a locale where many of his books take place (and also the namesake of this publisher). The story centers around the theories of time travel, as the characters ruminate over the philosophical and physical questions it raises, and over a strange letter from K-9999 that seemingly answers all these questions.
The Riddle of the Travelling Skull is an early Keeler mystery, whose opening line says it all: “I knew full well, when the Chinaman stopped me in the street that night and coolly asked me for a light for his cigarette, that a light for his cigarette was the last thing in the world he actually wanted!”
Lovingly handcrafted and pocket-sized, each Ramble House book contains every word found in the original text. So far they have two dozen books republished, and they hope to soon offer Keeler’s entire repertoire.
Bottom Line: The Ed Wood of Mystery.
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