The Riddle of Traveling Skull
Review by Darren Sutherland
The Riddle of the Traveling Skull
by
Harry Stephen Keeler
Collins Library.
(McSweeney's)
$18.00
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The Collins Library began in 2001 with a stated mission to rescue unusual works from the cobwebbed closets of history, or in the words of founder Paul Collins to give readers an alternative to a “greatest hits overview of past literature.” With their latest installation, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull by Harry Stephen Keeler, they have given new life to one of the stranger works of fiction I have read, a passionate and quirky mystery that somehow maintains an odd elegance.
Keeler has been called the “Ed Wood of literature,” and at times it is hard to tell whether you are reading the work of the world’s most inept writer, or an overlooked genius struggling against the constraints of conventional literature. Whereas Hitchcock was famous for using the McGuffin, an essentially meaningless aspect of the story, to draw the viewer through a film, Keeler seems to revel in the McGuffin as an end in itself, laying countless engaging but odd diversions before the reader, while seeming to forget his plot. The book purposefully rambles and digresses through an impossibly complicated series of coincidences and side-plots resulting in a looking glass of a mystery in which expectation is turned on its head. As the reader, you are led forward not so much by the whodunit, but primarily by a joyful curiosity as to what this author might be up to next. Keeler’s prose mirrors this chaotic order. Listen as Keeler describes his main character’s confusion: “My forehead was so corrugated, as I could sense by feeling alone, that an Eskimo’s fur coat, sprinkled with nothing but Lux, could have been washed on it.” Odd? Yes. But also funny, descriptive and endearing.
In 1924, a reviewer for the New York Times was “drawn to the inescapable conclusion that Mr. Keeler writes his peculiar novels merely to satisfy his own undisciplined urge for creative joy.” This manic book exudes Keeler’s unbounded passion for his many subjects, and it is infectious. You’ll marvel at his undisciplined turns of phrase, his outlandish plots, and his command (or misunderstanding) of arcane subjects. When so many contemporary books seem to emerge from the same tried-and-true (tired-and-true?) mold, Keeler’s unreserved flouting of any convention provides a welcome joyride through his somewhat disturbed mind.
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