The body of Andre Marceau lay in the middle of a lawn untouched by footprints. Marks suggesting strangulation circled his neck. Only Xenius Jones of Scotland Yard guessed the truth: The murderer wasn't, as police had suspected, the Flying Strangler-Baby, a helicopter-borne midget dressed as an infant who swooped down upon victims undetected.
"The Marceau Case" is characteristic of the works of the late mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler, who published prolifically in the 1930s and '40s. Unlikely coincidences pass for plot twists. Characters have the depth and personality of Popsicle sticks. Of Keeler, a reviewer in the New York Times wrote, "His best is not very good." The New York Herald Tribune called him "a leader of the slightly goofy school."
Yet after years of neglect, a Keeler revival is suddenly at hand. On Abebooks.com, a bookselling Web site, asking prices for some Keeler books run as high as $400. "I've had people grumble at me at the prices, but then they bought them," says Kevin Kinley, a Walkersville, Md., bookseller who is asking $350 or more each for two Keelers. He says he sold two last year for similar prices. Not that he has read Keeler's work, or plans to. "I've read about him, and that's enough," he says.
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, says he recently paid $250 for a Keeler, in good condition, for his own collection, but not to read. "I would sooner pound sand than read one again," he says.
A revival for bad writers
Bad writers never had it so good. Largely thanks to increased exposure on the Internet, prices for their works have been rising. First Editions of Ed Earl Repp, who wrote Westerns and science fiction (including a story called "The Gland Superman") fetch $100 on the Internet. Sydney Horler, a spy writer, was "egregiously bad," says Bill Pronzini, a mystery novelist who has produced three books on bad writing. "Fifteen, 20 years ago, you couldn't give away his books." A first-edition Horler now can be found for sale on the Web for $550.
Fender Tucker, an unemployed former country guitar player in Shreveport, La., has reprinted 24 Keeler novels with nothing more than a computer and homemade bookbinding equipment.
"I'm hoping for a small Keeler renaissance," says the 54-year-old Tucker. "There are a lot more people out there who would like Keeler. I just have to reach them."
These days, snippets and sometimes whole works are copied on sites devoted to bad writers. The Web site of Nick Page, the British author of a book called "The World's Worst Writers," supplies a link to this sentence by the late writer Amanda McKittrick Ros:
"Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?"
Says Page: "It's as sublimely incomprehensible as the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa."
R. Lionel Fanthorpe, an author in Wales who claims 250 books to his name, credits technology with helping to revive interest in his early works. Paid by length and speed in the pulp days of the 1950s and '60s, he would sometimes devote long passages to a philosophical discussion or the description of a rock, then be forced to tie up his story in the last few paragraphs when he realized he had dictated too many pages.
His speed gave birth to lines like this: "Trinkle did not possess a legal mind. He was a mental grasshopper, an intellectual kangaroo, a mind wallaby."
Now a 66-year-old writer of nonfiction books as well as a judo instructor, management consultant, volunteer Anglican priest and television-show host, the Rev. Fanthorpe delights in the discovery of his old works. These days, he says, "People are paying more for a copy of a book than I got paid for writing it." His new fans buy him drinks at autographing sessions, he says.
Can this last? "Many of these titles are not hard to find. For most of these books, nobody is going to pay three figures," says Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, and founder of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society. He suspects some booksellers are trying to take advantage of new Keeler devotees who don't know any better.
Bad writing, or is it deliberate?
Keeler, who wrote more than 60 books, may be the most daunting of the bunch. He occasionally would dip into a collection of random newspaper clippings and work them into his thick novels, no matter how irrelevant they might be, says Francis Nevins, a St. Louis University law professor and Keeler historian. And good luck guessing the identity of the murderer: The author sometimes didn't introduce the culprit until the last pages of a book. "Keeler just loved to bamboozle you," Nevins says.
Keeler often broke up one sentence -- several times! -- with pointless exclamations -- set off! -- by dashes. Characters have names like Yoho TenBrockerville, Aspenshade Cool-Donald, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel and Screamo the Clown.
Keeler's supporters don't like to see him included in lists of bad writers. "Is it bad writing, or is it deliberate?" asks Polt, who calls Keeler's style "eccentric writing." Keeler's universe is one of "demented elegance," Nevins says.
When Keeler died in 1967, publishers had long since deserted him. Then Fender Tucker came along. Born Thomas and nicknamed after his guitar, he gave up honky-tonks in 1986 to edit an electronic magazine devoted to the Commodore personal computer. He didn't mind that the Commodore, even then, was slipping into obsolescence because, he says, it meant his bosses ignored him.
"I like being in a rut," says Tucker. "I'm an inertia kind of guy."
He says he once wrote a Commodore computer program that randomly added the words "like" and "you know" to existing books "so kids can relate to the classics." Noting the prices and scarcity of Keeler's works on the Internet, he quit the Commodore magazine last year and went to work scanning and printing Keelers.
His publishing company, Ramble House, occupies a steamy second-floor study in his Shreveport home. He scans old Keeler novels borrowed from university libraries, prints them out sheet-by-sheet and binds them using a technique he won't disclose that seems to involve a clothes iron turned upside down and vials of chemicals.
So far, Tucker has sold more than 400 Keeler novels, at about $20 each. He figures that, before expenses, he makes the minimum wage for the time he puts in.
"I suppose I should get a job one of these days," he says. "But I get to read all the Keelers I want."
