The Spectacles of Mr Cagliostro — Harry Stephen Keeler
This is all Neil Gaiman’s fault. He mentioned Harry Stephen Keeler on his Tumblr blog as one of his ‘secret pleasures’, saying:
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.
So, naturally, I had to hunt up an ebook to give Keeler a try. It seems he wrote scores of books, most with bizarre titles. The Spectacles of Mr Calgliostro seems to be one of the best-regarded.
It has an utterly whacky plot (a Keeler speciality) to do with the heir to a vast industrial fortune coming to Chicago from Australia on learning of the death of his father. To his dismay, however, when the will is read it seems that his father only left him a pittance to live on.
Then there are these peculiar spectacles that his father bequeaths him, together with a strong request that he wear them for the duration of one year whenever out and in public, to satisfy a bet his father placed with the General Manager…
The screw gets turned several times more as the General Manager of his father’s business offers him money to carry out a bizarre scheme. A scheme which ends up sending the protagonist into a lunatic asylum. And while there…
And there’s this girl whose face he has never seen, but who he fell in love with in Australia because…
Ah, heck, I can’t summarise the plot. Let’s just say that through several unlikely turns of events, the protagonist finally triumphs.
Whacky, unbelievable. But reasonably well written nonetheless, and really very entertaining.
So now I have to find a copy of The Case of the Transposed Legs , or The Riddle of the Traveling Skull or The Skull of the Waltzing Clown.
Oh, and there’s even a Harry Stephen Keeler Society. Visit this before trying Keeler so you know what you’re getting into: http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/join.html .
Like this:
Like Loading…
Related
Originally published at rightword.com.au on February 22, 2016.
