An amusing and illuminating article on
Harry Stephen Keeler, the mad genius of crackpot pulp fiction
often compared to Ed Wood Jr.:
eeler transcended deus ex machina, deploying regiments of metaphorical
robots to keep things moving along all sorts of bizarre tangents. The
seemingly rickety labyrinth is held together by a fantastic agglomeration of
weird wills, lunatic laws, kooky contracts, idiotic oaths, and some of the
most outrageously beautiful multilayered, interlocking coincidences ever
devised by the human mind. The mystery is ultimately resolved by an
exquisitely unreal solution with all the wacky ingenuity of a flawlessly
conceived Rube Goldberg device.
(The standard Keeler protagonist)
may be the unwitting victim of a nefarious capitalist plot to
foreclose on his mortgage, steal his inheritance, or defraud him of his patent.
Through a bizarre chain of coincidences, he finds himself implicated in some
crime. His alibi is worthless, for his witnesses are invariably dead, abroad, or
otherwise incommunicado. He is deeply in love, but his fiancé can never
simply tie the knot. She has pledged to stay single until some rare book is
stolen or a one-act vaudeville play is produced...
Standard subplots involve weird curios, circus freaks, concealed identities,
and mysterious (but not sinister!) Chinese laundries. It's the stuff of pure pulp
fiction, but zanily transformed as if it's gone through the looking glass once
too often.