Harry Stephen Keeler

Harry Stephen Keeler (November 3, 1890 – January 22, 1967) was a prolific but little-known American fiction writer, who developed a cult following for his eccentric mysteries.

Born in Chicago in 1890, Keeler spent his childhood exclusively in this city, which was so beloved by the author that a large number of his works took place in and around it.

The expression is explained in the opening of Thieves' Nights (1929): Here ... were seemingly the same hawkers ... selling the same goods ... here too was the confusion, the babble of tongues of many lands, the restless, shoving throng containing faces and features of a thousand racial castes, and last but not least, here on Halsted and Maxwell streets, Chicago, were the same dirt, flying bits of torn paper, and confusion that graced the junction of Middlesex and Whitechapel High streets far across the globe.Other locales for Keeler novels include New Orleans and New York.

Beginning around age sixteen, Keeler wrote a steady stream of original short stories and serials that were subsequently published in many small pulp magazines of the day.

A notable early work was the 1915 science fiction story "John Jones' Dollar", originally published in a magazine entitled The Black Cat.

[2] Eight of Keeler's earliest works first appeared in pulp fiction magazines like Complete Novel and Top Notch.

The Voice of the Seven Sparrows introduced audiences the world over to Keeler's complicated "webwork plot" story lines with wildly improbable in-story coincidences and sometimes sheerly baffling conclusions.

[1] During this period Keeler was employed as an editor for Ten Story Book, a popular pulp short-story magazine that also included photos of nude and scantily clad young women.

[4][5] Keeler proceeded to fill the spaces between the features with his own peculiar brand of humor and included illustrations drawn by his wife.

His writing drifted even further beyond the norm and short stories written by his wife (a moderately successful writer herself) were found more and more within his novels.

Keeler typically padded the length of his novels with the following device: his protagonist would find a magazine or book, open it at random and discover a story.

He is reputed to have pasted these into the rough outlines of his novels, adding notes like "Have this happen to... " Keeler is known for the MacGuffin-esque insertion of skulls into nearly all his stories.

Several of Keeler's novels make reference to a fictional book entitled The Way Out, which is apparently a tome of ancient Oriental wisdom.

In the late 1930s, British writer John Russell Fearn gave credit to Keeler for inspiring his experiments with webwork plots in his pulp SF stories.