Harry Stephen Keeler (1890 – 1967) was a prolific, half-mad but little-known pulp fiction writer best known for his Door Stopper mysteries and Kudzu Plots.
The most noteworthy part of Keeler's writing style was something he deemed the "Webworks" method, in which he would simply write almost stream-of-consciousness with a vague web tying plot points together until the story moved forward, usually via a Contrived Coincidence. This meant that Keeler's writing was no stranger to the Random Events Plot, and also why he almost never wrote anything under 600 pages in lengthnote . As such, Keeler was one of the first writers to use a typewriter with a single massive roll of paper rather than individual sheets, as it meant he could spend less time resetting the paper and more time clacking away.
As otherwise mentioned, Keeler's long-winded writing style means that it boasts many peculiar idiosyncracies, such as the use of extreme run-on sentences conjoined by a wealth of hyphens and commas. He also frequently based stories in or around his hometown of Chicago, which he often gives grandiose titles like "The London of the West" and "The Baghdad on the Lakes".
While mostly forgotten within the literary world today, Harry Keeler maintains a small but extremely loyal cult following. Some of his readers believe his style is immensely entertaining due to being So Bad, It's Good, whereas others amongst them genuinely believe that his avalanche-of-words style continues to make his fiction read uniquely to this day in a way unlike any other writer.
His work includes examples of:
- Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: In "John Jones's Dollar" a man deposits a dollar in a bank, stipulating that it and its accumulated interest are to be paid to "no other person than [his] fortieth descendant ... along the oldest child of each of the generations which would constitute his posterity". By the time the fortieth generation rolls around, the payout is greater than the total value of the combined holdings of the entire human race.
- Framed Clue: The mystery novel The Face of the Man from Saturn concerns a painting of a bizarre extraterrestrial. Someone breaks into the shop where this painting is stored, kills the owner, and then cuts the Saturnian's face from the canvas ... and steals this, leaving the rest of the portrait. The detective discovers that a message revealing the location of treasure is concealed beneath the portrait's face. But there were two copies of the painting, and the killer stole the wrong one.
- The Film of the Book: Sing Sing Nights to The Mysterious Mr. Wong.
- Mind Screw: Just read the resolution of X. Jones of Scotland Yard
