The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934)

Until I read this book, I never understood the phrase, “so bad it’s good.” What an absurd phrase! Except that in Keeler’s case, it’s true, and I’ll go one further: “so bad it’s insanely brilliant.” So bad that you can almost see the author winking at you, so bad that it becomes a sort of metafictional commentary on the mystery novels of the time. As the author assures us (through the mouth of one of his characters) in the last chapter of the book, “To tell you the truth, I—I really wanted to show you how easy it is to—to construct dramatic fiction plot—what a racket these damned fictioneers have!—so that never again will you pay $2.00 for a mystery novel.”

Keeler’s prose is bad. The writing is riddled with ridiculously self-conscious similes and metaphors. His dialects are insane. “Unt I know dot you two don’t zee dot your bags iss now geshifted, mid dot car uf ours now going der odder vay…,” states the German tram conductor. Indeed. The narrative tends to circle back on itself drunkenly as the protagonist goes off on tangents, then lurches back to the beginning, or runs around telling friends in great detail about events that have already been narrated to the reader. The characters include Philodexter Maxellus, Ichabod Chang, and Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel (the woman with the “world’s longest name,” who—spoiler alert!—marries the man with the world’s shortest name)—oh, and Legga the Human Spider.

If the plot seems to contain a number of arbitrary and tenuously relevant events, one may be interested to know that this novel is an example of Keeler’s “webwork” fiction. That is, he would cut out interesting newspaper articles, throw them in a pile, pick out a fistful at random and try to tie them all together. The story lurches along until three-quarters of the way through the novel, the protagonist offers an explanation of the situation that is, if somewhat lacking in plausibility, at least neat and rational. Mystery solved, right? Wrong. In the last quarter of the book, Keeler gleefully tears apart that conclusion in favor of a crazy web of extraordinarily unlikely coincidences that has the reader scratching his or her head until the final sentence—and even then s/he is left screaming, “What? What?!” I won’t spoil the ending, but trust me, it’s, well, avant-garde.

Now, if I’ve made the novel sound so bad that you’re about to strike it from your wishlist, let me assure you: I have rarely had so much fun reading a book. My husband and I read this novel aloud to each other, guffawing all the way through. We came away quoting, “Life! What a tangle it is, isn’t it? Gott! People—objects—all bound together—in all sorts of odd relationships!” I urge you to read Paul Collins’s masterful introduction before beginning, as it frames the book perfectly. (I assume the reader will be picking up the widely available McSweeney’s Collins Library edition. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull and almost all of Keeler’s other works are also published by a small press called Ramble House.)

Caveat lector: this book is extremely politically incorrect. ( )

Keeler is like the David Lynch of 30s-40s mystery writing. You'll be dragged into a bizzare non-reality as the plot thickens and you try to untangle it, only to realize you're not supposed to try to. ( )