When something is really bad - a book, a movie, a painting, a joke, it is, in fact, really good. Perhaps that is why some of our actors and writers are as successful as they are. People love to check out what fresh depths they might have plumbed.
Harry Stephen Keeler was a pulp novelist who was so bad that he was good. As a writer of detective fiction, the only thing he had in common with Agatha Christie was the year of birth, 1890. His plots were ridiculous, the denouement pathetic, and his characters had strange names and spoke in strange dialects. Years after his death, however, Keeler became a cult figure with fan clubs and websites devoted to him.
The popular novelist Neil Gaiman said of him, “My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.”
In 1936, Keeler wrote X Jones of Scotland Yard where a man is found strangled in the middle of a lawn. There are no footprints other than his own. The suspect is the ‘Flying Strangler Baby’, a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks his victims by a helicopter. That gives you the flavour of his work. The book is also notable for mentioning the guilty party for the first time in the last sentence of the 448-page book.
At some point in some of the books, the reader would come across a page which said, “STOP! At this point all the characters have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery... CAN YOU DO IT?”
Would you be intimidated by such a question? A recent study has found that our enjoyment of detective stories depends on our self- esteem. The less confident we are, the better we like it when the murderer is revealed to have been exactly whom we suspected all along, and vice-versa.
Or as the study put it, “A resolution that confirmed respondents’ suspicion was disliked by persons with high self-esteem, whereas respondents with low self-esteem disliked a surprising resolution.”
Guessing correctly, it says, is a ‘little self-esteem boost’, so valuable to so many of us. There is a similarity with understanding a joke, perhaps.
Keeler’s technique was unique. He wrote a manuscript, twice or thrice the size required, and then cut it down removing some subplots. The cut portions (he called these ‘chunks’) would then go into the next book which would go through a similar cutting procedure and provide more chunks. The book Thieves’ Nights has a hero reading a book about two other men telling stories, detailed at some length.
The critic Anthony Boucher, a loyal Keelerite, probably summed it up best: “His fabulous fertility could make Keeler the greatest writer in the business – if only he could write.”
You could say that of so many of our successful writers!
