Return to Harry Stephen Keeler Pag
ADVENTURE IN MILWAUKEE
Introduction
Francis M. Nevins
What you have here, fellow Keelerite, is one of the earliest products of Harry’s pen that you’re likely to see—a charming tale, full of pretzel-twists of plot and chaste young romance and pre-World War I atmosphere, and not in the least verbose like the brobdingnagians of HSK’s later years.
Keeler first set pen to paper in 1910, producing the 2700-word story “Telescopic Romance” which he never sold commercially, although he later published it in the Chicago Ledger, which he was editing at the time, and also included a much more long-winded version of the same tale as Chapters XVI through XXIX of his novel Y. CHEUNG—BUSINESS DETECTIVE (1939). After his release from the insane asylum to which his mother had committed him, he returned to writing and began to sell short stories (the longest only 4000 words) to various magazines. Late in 1914 he began developing the webwork plots which were to become his trademark, completing two short novels, “The Corpse at No. 38” and “The Trepanned Skull,” which sold in 1915. From this point on his output became longer and more densely plotted by the day. He completed “The Stolen Finger” and “The Michaux Z-Ray” in 1915 and four more novellos (as he came to call fiction of this length) the following year. “Misled in Milwaukee” was his title for the shortest of the quartet, which weighed in at about 26,000 words and sold in 1917 to an unidentified magazine that paid him $65 for first publication rights. Five years later, as “The Search for Xeno,” it was included in the December 1922 issue of 10-Story Book under the byline of York T. Sibley—a bit of deception Keeler thought prudent because the editor to whom he’d sold the reprint rights was, of course, himself! Almost forty years later Harry completely rewrote the tale— eliminating the 1916-era shirt collars that are crucial to the plot and splicing in some references to the atomic bomb and other feeble attempts to update—and, as “Adventure in Milwaukee,” included it with two other tales of the same length in a package he sent to his Spanish publisher Instituto Editorial Reus. The collection of THREE SHORT NOVELS was never published even in Spain. For the present book Ramble House has tacked the title as it appears in that late typescript to the text as it appeared in 10-Story Book back in 1922.
What makes this tale almost unique in the Keeler Kanon is that Harry never recycled its plot. Or did he? “Whoa, Tilley!” you might well say to yourself after reading a few pages. “A young hick from Wauwaukauchee Lake, Wisconsin, who takes a train to the big city to find the vanished brother whose name begins with an X and whose signature he needs on a deed to the farm they jointly own...I’ve been down this path before!” And indeed you have, sort of—at least if you’re familiar with the Keeler novel published in England as THE SEARCH FOR X-Y-Z (1944) and in the U.S. as the much shorter THE CASE OF THE IVORY ARROW (1945). But Harry himself was aware of this issue, and addressed it in a note to his long-suffering Spanish translator Fernando Noriega Olea which survives as part of the THREE SHORT NOVELS typescript.
To Senor Noriega: This is not a condensation of THE SEARCH FOR X-Y-Z. The two stories only start out somewhat similarly in their opening scenes.
Those who have read THE SEARCH FOR X-Y-Z will surely agree that Harry told the exact truth.
Since this is a short novel, I’ll keep my introduction short too. If late Keeler is just too wacky for you, you’re sure to enjoy this early effort. It’s as close to normal as Harry ever got.