NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler SocietyNo. 80 ................................... October, 2012

� KeelerNews No. 80

Jim Weiler brought my attention to Span-ish cartoonists Miguel A. Giner Bou and Carlos Ortín, who (Spanish media say) are working on a graphic novel based on The Spectacles of Mr. Ca-gliostro. I can’t wait! Meanwhile, another publisher has beaten Reus to the punch in reissuing the Spanish trans-lation of this classic (see p. 5). Spectacles is one of several early Keeler novels now available as e-books on Amazon from Pro-logue Books—a division of F+W Media, which also publishes Writer’s Digest. F+W is based here in Cincinnati and even used to be headquartered across the street from Xavier University, where I work. Coincidence?

✍ Fender Tucker, along with Jim Weiler, is re-sponsible for the Keeler-publishing dynamo that is Ramble House. But did you know that Fend-er’s alter ego, Knees Calhoon, has been playing and creating rock and roll songs since the early ’60s? You can now hear remastered versions of Knees’ songs at kneescalhoon.blogspot.com.

✍ Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice this summer, I duly noted the absurdly convoluted plot (with hints of Oriental intrigue) and the grab bag of ludicrous names (Sauncho Smilax, Japo-nica Fenway, Delwyn Quight, Knees Calhoon … just teasing, FT). Pynchon has never issued any denial that he was profoundly influenced by Harry Stephen Keeler (see my query to him in KN #61). Case closed … groovy.

NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society

It is this artificial relationship, this purely fictional web-work plot, this bit of life twisted into a pattern

mathematically and geometrically true, that fills the gaps in one’s spirit which rebels at the

looseness of life as it apparently is.

No. 80, October 2012

On our cover: the first known Keeler in French

(story, p. 6)

Editor’s Notes .........................................2The Stolen Gravestone ............................3Las gafas del Sr. Cagliostro ......................5Keeler en français?! ................................6Richard Polt interview ............................7Webwork poem .....................................8Big Girl Photo Number ...........................9Letters .................................................. 10Membership Update ............................ 12A Sentence from the Master ................. 12Books for Sale ...................................... 12

Published at the whim of a hatby the Harry Stephen Keeler Society4745 Winton Rd., Cincinnati, OH 45232 USApolt@xavier.edu • 513-591-1226keelersociety.mondoplex.com

Editor: Richard PoltISSN 1524-2323 • Founded 1997

Keeler News is free. Donations are accepted in the form of checks payable to Richard Polt, cash, stamps, or PayPal to polt@xavier.edu. If you receive this bulletin in digital form, print it for longevity. Print full-sized & double-sided for best results. If you would like a black-and-white printed copy by postal mail, simply ask the editor. If you receive this bulletin on paper, a note of thanks will ensure that you get the next issue. All issues can be downloaded from our web site, and can be ordered there on paper for a pittance. You may copy this document and distribute it by any method. When quoting it, please cite properly and give credit to the author. To join the HSK Society and be added to our mailing list, ask the editor and state your town of residence. To be removed from the list, just ask.

KeelerNews No. 80 �

Like a fine amontillado, The Stolen Gravestone delivers a subtle nuttiness where one who has read Keeler, just as one who enjoys amontillado, expects to detect a great profusion of nuttiness; with the tongue in one case, or, for the novel, the eye. The subtlety here is the difference of con-struction in the overall plot and the individual chapters. The creation of the work itself was also a rare method for Keeler. We have all heard the tales that Keeler typed his novels on giant rolls so he needn’t ever pause in his composition; that he sub-mitted giant manuscripts of thousands of pages which editors forced him to split up, change slight-ly, and sell piece by piece; and that he often spliced technical manuals and the writings of his wife into his own story whether it furthered the plot or not. In The Stolen Gravestone the maneuver du jour is a blend of narratives from different extant Keeler novels—so those who have borne the life stories of several convicts at a stretch, or the sudden treatises on philosophy or Chinese history that have immunized us to semipermanent tangents, now have the joy of coming to the realization that these same events have happened to other characters in a different novel. Gravestone is a cut-up of The Murdered Math-ematician and The Search for X-Y-Z, the specific amounts of which are laid out in fine detail by Francis M. Nevins in the preface. The names and MacGuffins are changed to make one consistent

tale—but a tale bearing strange gifts, or teach-ing a homely lesson, or something. It was never sold in Keeler’s lifetime, and has been published solely by the “magnimanimous” Ramble House company in the century following the one in which it was written: a transcentury Keeler nov-el, just as he would have wanted. Going into the story with this knowledge, I decided to search for motive: why did Keeler

take vast portions of nov-els already in publication, change the names and the topic of discussion from a missing brother to a miss-ing gravestone, and tack on a few chapters of open-ing and closing material? I thought the large recycled sections might be telling in some way. There might be practi-cal reasons: Harry needed to put out another book, work up some quick mon-ey to fix a health problem or put out more Keeler Keyhole newsletters. Per-haps the sections used to build Gravestone were per-

sonal favorites that he felt deserved another look from his Spanish pulp-novel fan base. Then there are the artistic reasons, which are harder to pinpoint but somehow evident in the text. The book does offer something different, if only slyly so. It takes place nine years in the fu-ture (written 1958, while the one-year-old grave-stone of the title is dated “d. 1966”), and follows the tall, Chinese, amateur sleuth Saul Wing as he tries to solve not one case, but two unrelated cases by the drop of the final curtain. So we have two unique premises: mild futur-

Book Review

The Stolen Gravestoneby Carl Foster

� KeelerNews No. 80

ism, and the concept that a sleuth, if he is good enough, may be able to solve two cases by the end of one book. And Saul Wing assuredly is, with his feigned naivete, his powerful build, his heart of gold and his pocket full of cash (for buy-ing disguises). Saul Wing is a character who thrives on para-dox, or a split self, just like his biblical namesake. He is the Chinese who doesn’t speak Chinese, he is the genius who never went to school; he is the jobless man with $107� in his pocket; he dresses as a woodland lumberjack to wander through Gyp Row, brimming with freaks, in downtown Chicago; and he dresses as a theological student to move through a gambling carnival, also with a freak-show, on the outskirts of town. He works undercover, but he is honest about his objec-tives if given even the slightest opportunity. He is described as “gallant,” “yellow knight,” and with any other number of chivalrous terms and deeds; but he seems to have no Lady, rather he works for himself. Saul Wing is a fine Keeler cre-ation. As Saul enters the case of the stolen grave-stone, he has just busted a stiff-roller in the Pal-ace Hotel in order to prove himself worthy to join the Spelvin National Detective Agency, based in Chicago. But one case is not enough to convince the head of the agency that an exceedingly tall Chinese man would make a good undercover operative. However, solving two cases would guarantee him a place on Spelvin’s team. At first Saul is reluctant to accept, despite the fact that he wants to be a detective more than anything: the odd nature of the case, the stolen grave of pastrymaker Frank J. Jansky, elicits only confu-sion from Saul, as well as intuitive suggestions that are strikingly similar to those offered by the Scottish grounds keeper Fife MacDuff of Peace-ful Rest Cemetery right after the stone went miss-ing. Spelvin, however, has just received a phone call which provides an entirely new spin on all the evidence and events surrounding the crime, which now suggest the foul play of a carnival worker. Here is where the reader enters what is known as “the split,” and she is taken in hand by the human yin yang himself, Saul Wing, and

guided over the boundary that separates two en-tirely different ways of looking at the exact same facts. His story is a mystery that meets all Keeler standards: it is convoluted, full of freaks (#1 Keeler for tumor descriptions), seasoned with patois, and it requires a minimum �0 pages’ ex-planation played out between characters so the reader is prepared for a monstrous forthcom-ing twist in the plot which justifies the first half of the story’s having very little to do with the second half. And of course, at one point a poem is handed to Saul which was obviously written by Hazel Keeler. He hands it back, deeming it “Swell,” and the story goes on. The overall shape of the story is different, most likely because of the assemblage nature of The Stolen Gravestone. Unlike many of Keeler’s previous works, this one seems deliberately void of cliffhangers. In the reading of it one feels disoriented–trying to follow a Keeler story that is not punctuated by scenes such as a man stum-bling over what seems to be his own corpse, or realizing he has several identical twins he did not know about. Instead, most of the chapters contain all the oddball events within their mid-sections, and the chapters end with modest que-ries for more information, or sentences like: “And just how... can be your guess, as good as mine.”

“Well, here’s hoping, anyway. And see you again, Captain—when I see you!”

“Well, yes—it is,” frankly returned Saul.

Yes, instead of trying to explain away the outlandish, last-second contortions of his imagi-nation with each new chapter, Keeler drives this plot with a different rhythm and puts his thrust into the focused descriptions of unusual scen-ery: fixtures in a scummy hotel, service in a res-taurant with bootleg gin, and the gentle, outgo-ing nature of an ossified man. Freaks, especially. Keeler loved freaks of nature; we know this. Gyp Row and the Carnival, the two chunks of other

KeelerNews No. 80 5

novels that mated to produce The Stolen Grave-stone, have freaks aplenty. But perhaps the no-tion that freaks belong with other freaks isn’t the only reason they were fused. If the reader marks off the sections where old is patched together with new, it seems plausible that Keeler discerned a new style in these parts of different books, that he found them distinct from his rote style, and thus thought they could

be displayed together as a freak-show unto themselves: the Extraordinary Untwisted Keeler Plots! The homely lesson one may learn, of course, is what I learned when the book ended, namely, the futility of that old philosopher’s question, “Why?” I won’t ask that one again. N

LAS GAFAS DEL SEÑOR CAGLIOSTRO

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EDICIONES DEL AZAREDICIONESDEL AZAR

¿Nunca has oído hablar de Harry Stephen Keeler? No eres el único. Es uno de los autores norteamericanos más olvidados, víctima de un complot de editores destinado a arrancar de cuajo a todos aquellos escritores que no tienen una prosa rápida, fácil de leer y masticada para las masas. Harry escribía porque le gustaba y muy pronto desarrolló un estilo propio. Tramó argumentos increíblemente retorcidos en los que aparecían personajes étnicos (que hablaban dialectos horribles), cultura popular de los años treinta y cuarenta y su elemento de suspense favorito: las calaveras. Los escritores actuales tienen las pruebas de ADN, él prefería las calaveras. Una vez que has leído a Keeler, ya no vuelves a ser el mismo.

Las gafas del señor Cagliostro, publicada por primera vez en 1928, fue su novela más popular en España. En ella, como en ninguna otra, el lector se ve cautivado por la esencia de Keeler: la búsqueda de lo azaroso, las casualidades increíbles y las situaciones no menos imposibles.

Otros títulos de la colección:

1. Alejandro DumasVEINTE AÑOS DESPUÉS

2. Mark TwainINOCENTESEN EL EXTRANJERO

3. Charles DickensDOMBEY E HIJO

4. Honoré de BalzacGRANDEZA Y DECADENCIA DE CESAR BIROTTEAU

5. Luigi CapuanaEL MARQUÉS DE ROCCAVERDINA

Harry Stephen Keeler nació en Chicago, ciudad donde vivió siempre. Al quedar su madre viuda prematuramente, la casa familiar se convirtió en casa de huéspedes, siendo los inquilinos principalmente actores de revista. Fue internado en un manicomio a los 20 años de edad durante un año. Después de su internamiento, estudió ingeniería eléctrica. Su afición a escribir le hizo presentar varios relatos en pulps. Publicó su primera novela «La voz de los siete gorriones», en 1924. Escribía en sus momentos libres, llegando a publicar 40 novelas.

Es uno de los autores proscritos de la literatura norteamericana de la depresión. Keeler no quería hacerse creíble, su intención era sorprender con giros inesperados, para que el lector se viera inmerso en una serie de situaciones, donde no pudiera imaginar como salir.

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9 7 8 8 4 9 5 8 8 5 1 1 1

Here’s an unexpected development: a new edition of the Spanish version of The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, but not from its original publisher, Reus. This handsome volume was published earlier this year by Ediciones del Azar (Chance Editions) of

Barcelona. Evidently it’s a minor publisher, since it has almost no Web presence. And when I was briefly in Barcelona this summer, I asked for this book in several book-

stores but got nada. It is available on amazon.es, among other online sources. Accord-ing to the publisher, this novel is “a small masterpiece of its genre. … the author is captivated by the essence of Keeler: the search for the fortuitous, incredible coinci-

dences, and situations that are just as impossible.” —Ed.

6 KeelerNews No. 80

Aside from one or two references in Harry’s notoriously unreliable publicity to French

translations, I had never encountered such a thing, and had concluded years ago that HSK’s books were never actually published in the Gal-lic tongue. Then, on one of my occasional re-views of Keeler material on eBay, I stumbled across L’étrange émeraude. It has to be a very rare item. The publisher is Editions de l’Étoile verte (Green Star Editions), of Anvers (Antwerp), Belgium. There is no refer-ence at all to this publisher on the Web, and no date on the book. But it must have been printed sometime after the publication of De zeldzame smaragd in the Netherlands in 19�5, since the cover of the Dutch book is echoed in an inset on the Belgian cover. The translator is an F. Ranusy, and the publisher claims copyright on the French translation.

The titles of both books mean The Strange Em-erald, but the American title is Thieves’ Nights. The illustrator of this and a few other Dutch Keelers, published by Zuid-Hollandsche in The Hague, was “BMB.” According to a recent e-mail from Ellen Boonstra-de Jong, BMB was Johanna Berhardina Bokhorst, who in 1905 married Jean Jacques Midderigh. She was born on Java in 1880 and died in Wassenaar (Holland) in 197�. As for the man on the cover of L’étrange émer-aude, I believe that’s Spencer Tracy. With or with-out permission, Editions de l’Étoile verte used a still from a Hollywood movie as an illustration. The same was done by Zuid-Hollandsche when they used Paramount stills on the covers of sev-eral Dutchified Keelers in the ’30s.

—Richard Polt

Keeler en français?!

KeelerNews No. 80 7

This interview was conducted in 2010 and was meant for an audience unfamiliar with Keeler, but we both thought it might also be of interest to HSKS mem-bers.

Jeffrey Bützer: What made you first take an in-terest in HSK? How did you learn of him?

Richard Polt: In 1996 I was searching the Web, which was still new then, for information about old typewriters, and bumped into William Poundstone’s page about HSK simply because it contained the word “typewriter.” Everything about Keeler thrilled me right away – I just knew that there was something rich and strange here that I needed to know more about. After I read my first Keeler, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, I was completely hooked.

JB: In your research have you learned the origin of some of his odd obsessions, such as trepan-ning and Chinese culture?

RP: I don’t know where he picked up the tre-panning obsession. Chinese culture, along with much else, seeped into him in his childhood. Remember that he lived in Chicago, a very in-ternational and multicultural place, and grew up in a boarding house for vaudevillians, where he undoubtedly met all sorts of odd theatrical characters.

JB: Keeler novels are loaded with completely ab-surd coincidences… do you have a favorite sce-nario?

RP: In one of my favorite stories, The Search for X-Y-Z, the main character is looking all over Wiscon City for his brother, X-Y-Z Jenkins, but keeps being misled by characters with similar sounding names, like Brawthoe Rex or Eggs Wei (a Chinese gangster). Keeler loves games like this, and doesn’t care about plausibility. And of course, though I don’t want to spoil any plots, Keeler loves unreliable narrators. When a story is narrated in first person, there’s a strong likeli-hood that on the last page you’ll find out that the speaker is someone completely other than who you thought he was.

JB: Favorite character? I love his names he choos-es… like Scientifico Greenlimb.

RP: Ebenezer Sitting-Down-Bear, from The Won-derful Scheme of Christopher Thorne, is one of HSK’s most interesting characters. He’s mixed-race, angry, and given to religious mysticism. I wouldn’t call him fully three-dimensional, but he’s less forgettable than most Keeler characters. Usually the characters are just pegs to hang the plot on.

JB: Do you consider Harry an outsider artist like, say, Henry Darger? Or do you think he very much was aware of how avant-garde his writing was?

RP: He wasn’t an outsider artist; he was always part of the publishing establishment, or wanted to be, or wanted to get back into it. As for how self-aware he was, that’s a difficult and very in-teresting question. I am increasingly convinced that he wrote deliberately and created his effects on purpose. One exception might be his very talkative dialogues, full of dialect and wiseacre remarks; I have a feeling he expected them to be more entertaining than they are. Of course, no one else was trying to create this particular com-bination of weird effects, or taking them as far as Keeler did; the fact that he deliberately did this makes him, in a sense, the ultimate outsider. His mind just worked in a very eccentric way.

JB: Has there been an occurrence that has spiked interest in Keeler in the past decade?

RP: It’s been a combination of factors, with one event influencing another in a webwork tangle. Notable developments include: the rise of Ram-ble House, which publishes all Keeler novels on a print-on-demand basis; the promotional efforts of well-placed members; and the republication of The Riddle of the Traveling Skull by McSweeney’s.

JB: I heard Mr. Roger Ebert recently joined the group. Who are some of the other well known members?

Jeffrey Bützer interviews Richard Polt

(continued on back page)

8 KeelerNews No. 80

Webwork As Proof That All Syllogism Is Queerby Ian Krieger

If X is more about gilt than guiltIt is feasible that Y will replace whyWithout tilting at windmillsAs the tale’s turn posits bewildering twistsAn inside-out spawning cryptologyThat much like 1920’s EgyptologyOr a traveling circusFollows a circuit of sorts or shorts outThe enumerated implicationsOf the early mechanics of TVAs if vacuum tubes presumeA hole in the fabric of the schemeThat escalates rather than backs outThat reverses reversals in lieuOf allowing that it is only about what it is aboutBecause like a departing auto-gyro Loaded with hypothesisBecause the plausible is never rightHow only illicit logic showsWhy what you seem to see can spectacularly

fail youAs other possibilities spontaneously wailBecause the difference between friction and

fictionStrings-up credibility to show how most linear

things really circleBecause life is more reel than realBecause knockout drops or the presence of

a skullHints as to the manner of how screwball riddles

the riddleBecause offbeat invites a more advanced

syncopationTwisting the incredulous into a proofThat extenuating circumstances can’t even begin

to uprootBecause ecstasy enhances chance

Till one must let go of disbelief Because manipulated suspension replaces make

believe so oftenThat one experiences the joy of hanging on for

dear lifeRather than what mundane probable realism of

the worldEstablishes as naturally occurring antidote to

the absurdHow levelheadedness plugs holes Despite how much more exciting it is to leakTo play hide and seekVia ecstatic obscurities and farfetched

loopholesBecause mega subverts minimal As sublimity sabotages the dead-end of

conclusionFor all threads meet as to become capaciousRather than neatly packaged but lacking

vivacious faceRather than lapsing in dull logos of being not

outrageously concludedWhy being specious and spacious Rather than let elaboration be stripped-downAllows it to be a rumble rather than humbledTo the sensibleness of the realistically denudedThat by following the knit-picking of the

sticklersDemonstrates why the idiosyncraticShows how it goes topsy-turvy in a blink Thus transubstantiating how to be paidBy inking stories how crime ultimately

does not payUnless there is a taller story to be toldOr a fallacy that appearance eludedThat says no matter how it endsIt never stays concluded N

KeelerNews No. 80 9

The September 1930 issue of 10 Story Book featured Harry’s favorite cover girl, the haunting Countess Vera Martin De Mueller. For more on Vera, see Keeler News issues 58, 59, and 73. For more 10 Story Book covers, visit our hush-hush website for iconoclasts at http://bit.ly/dqp1Sn.

10 KeelerNews No. 80

The Theatrical Chicago studio portraits in the newest News are simply delightful, and the “Let-ters To Deedee” envelope and text repros invite inspection with a ratiocinative magnifying glass to suss out their hidden and enigmatic aspects! For my own self, and speaking perhaps for all readers of Keeler News, I wish to proclaim at this point that your dedication to the HSK cause is an encouragement and inspiration to us all!

Jay MandevilleIndependence, Mo.

Just opened the PDF of the latest HSKNews, and wanted to thank you for including a picture of my book cover! I now feel an even deeper kin-ship with Harry—should I ever write another academic book, I’ll include a “STOP—You Now Have Enough Clues To Guess The Thesis” page (probably on page �). Now I’m going to read the contents, to the background sounds of the new Keeler album. Harry would be flabbergasted.

Mike SalerBerkeley, Cal.

Harry’s letters are astounding. Did he really know people like that? They seem like Keeler characters who fuzz in and out of some parallel world for the purpose of meeting Harry Stephen Keeler. I’m pleased to discover that the Keeler Society is such an active and creative group. Much more so than the average bear (or human). Seemingly unstupefied by The InterGoogle or TeeVee.

Daniel Schroedl Minneapolis

I am woefully behind in finishing Keeler’s collected works, but he remains one of my chief literary influences as well a sort of de facto life coach. I wear my Keeler Society t-shirts on spe-cial occasions or to cheer me up when I realize that I have ended up in Florida.

Ian KriegerDunedin, Fla.

˙ I would like to publicly state that after years of meeting people from Chicago and referring to their homeland as “that London of the West” as it appears in �0+ Keeler novels, not a single one has accepted that as a legitimate phrase of any kind.

Carl FosterThe Colony, Tex.

I had just finished reading Y. Cheung, Business Detective, when this specimen of spam (or—is it?) appeared in my inbox.

Attention:Beneficiary

I am Mr. Y. Cheong and i work with Allied Irish Bank GB Leicester Office .I feel quite safe dealing with you in this business proposition although,this medium(Internet)has been greatly abused. … I wish to have a deal with you as regards to your unpaid funds and I have your file before me and hope your data ‘s are correct and UN-tampered unless you reconfirm it not correct.Among several others, I have decided to present you as the Next of Kin/Will Beneficiary to an overdue inheritance sum of £9.7M belonging to our Late client our de-ceased client …Waiting for your reply soon.

Yours Faithfully,Mr. Y. Cheong.

Hua HsuPoughkeepsie, N.Y.

Y. Cheong’s business proposal came from an e-mail address in Japan and ended with an ad in Icelan-dic: “Lestu blöðin á Vísir Vefblöð! Fréttablaðið og Markaðinn á http://www.visir.is.” Looks legitimate to me! Maybe our man in Reykjavik, Eysteinn Björns-son, has met Mr. Cheong.

Letters

KeelerNews No. 80 11

I’m a passionate reader in every genre, and of course that includes crime and mystery novels. I got to know Keeler’s work when I was ten, because my father had some of his novels. In the early ’80s I contacted Editorial Reus and bought all the novels they had; just a few were missing, and later I found them in used bookstores. In one of my HSK books I found the receipt for my last order from Reus. All of these books were hardbacks, but they lacked the fantastic color dustjackets from the ’50s. Now Las gafas del Señor Cagliostro has just been published in Spain by Ediciones del Azar, very well edited for the first time. It says that copyright belongs to the heirs of Harry Stephen Keeler and Fernando Noriega Olea, but later says that the publisher has failed to find the copyright holders.

Joaquín VillanuevaValencia, Spain

The total cost of 2725 pesetas for your ten books in 1984 is comparable to roughly €50/$65 today. A bargain!

From a May � New York Times interview with Neil Gaiman

Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him. How can you not love a man who wrote books with names like “The Riddle of the Traveling Skull”? Or “The Case of the Transposed Legs”? I get into arguments with Otto Penzler, of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, when I say things like that. “No, Neil!” he splutters. “He was just a bad writer!” Otto still takes my money when I buy Keeler books like “The Skull of the Waltz-ing Clown” from him. But the expression on his face takes some of the fun out of it. And then I read a para-graph like [one from the opening of Riddle and] I do not give a fig for Otto’s expression, for as guilty plea-sures go, Keeler is as strangely good as it gets.

1� KeelerNews No. 80

In the next

NewsBulletin of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society

The Prestidigitations— —of “Alphabet” Keeler!

A Sentence from the Master“Was it not Confucius,” he queried, “who once said that Truth is exactly like the sleeve of a coat—insofar as that when it is turned inside-out, it is still Truth?”

The Man with the Crimson Box

New MembersGoodwin,Dave, Owenton, Md.Gutierrez,Jon, BrooklynHof,Thomas, St. LouisMcDonald,Patrick, Leura, NSW, AustraliaVierling,Richard, San DiegoVillanueva,Joaquín, Valencia, Spain

Returning MembersGlynn,Tony,Southport, Merseyside, UK

Spotted on abebooks.com:

FIND THE CLOCK. Dutton, in dj, $90. You Little Dickens, Muncy, PA.

THIEVES’ NIGHTS. Ward Lock, 1931, good, £3.99. Steed Books, Ripe, SX, UK.

EN BUSCA DE XYZ. Reus, 1946, good, €10. Desván del Libro, Madrid, Spain.

EL CAMIÓN DE ORO DESAPARECIDO, €17.90; NOCHES DE SING-SING, €12.40; LA TRAMA ASOMBROSA, €17.40. Reus editions in custom binding. Alcaná Libros, Madrid, Spain.

Get yearly volumes of Keeler News for a paltry <$3!site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/news

RP: Probably the best known are novelists Neil Gaiman, Ed Park, and Francis M. Nevins; nonfic-tion author William Poundstone; and Ken Keeler (writer for “Futurama” and no relation to HSK). We also have a good number of other writers, cartoonists, musicians, and academics.

JB: Can you talk about the webwork plotting HSK used?

RP: “Webwork” was Harry’s term for a very complicated plot structure. He never claimed to have invented the concept, and in fact, if you read mysteries from a century ago you’ll find that a lot of them have entertaining, convoluted plots that keep you guessing until the end. What Keeler did was develop that genre to a whole new level of complexity and absurdity. He also theorized about it, developing his own system of diagramming plots, which represents characters and objects as intersecting timelines, and com-ing up with a seemingly endless list of types of intersections between plot elements.

JB: Any final plugs?

RP: I’d like to invite people to visit our web page and download some back issues of KeelerNews. If they get hooked, I’d like to make some suggestions. Some cartoonists have created piec-es about HSK or based on his work, but we still need a big Keeler-based graphic novel. Another thing that would be great is a Keeler-based film. There have been some shorts, but the first and last Keeler-inspired feature films came out in 19��. We are overdue for more! N

Polt interview — cont’d. from p. 7