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THE AFFAIR OF THE BOTTLED DEUCE
INTRODUCTION
Francis M. Nevins
In the late 1950s the Chicago branch of Mystery Writers of America was a small and sleepy organization, among whose members was one Harry Stephen Keeler. Even though no American publisher had bought a book from him since 1948 and his English publisher had dropped him five years later, Keeler kept up his membership—mainly because it gave him access to just about the only social life he had—and kept hoping his luck would change. His closest friend among the members was W.T. Brannon, an eyepoppingly prolific author of true-crime pieces for magazines. The members he seemed to envy most deeply were Richard Himmel and Milton K. Ozaki, who had managed to hitch rides on that gravy train of 1950s popular fiction, the original paperback novel. Keeler was no more equipped to write for that market than is a toad to perform a Louis Vierne organ symphony, but every so often he’d make a half-hearted stab in that direction. THE AFFAIR OF THE BOTTLED DEUCE seems to have started out as one of those stabs.
This 65,000-word novel, completed on August 15, 1958, was immediately followed by THE STRAW HAT MURDERS and THE CASE OF THE TRANSPARENT NUDE. What makes all three rarae aves in the Keeler Kanon is that they might pass in a pea-soup fog for the kinds of softcover originals about tough cops tackling crime in the big city’s mean streets that were being published regularly by Gold Medal, Ace, Avon, Dell, Pyramid and countless other houses of the time. Pull down Fender Tucker’s A TO IZZARD: A HARRY STEPHEN KEELER COMPANION (2002) from your pile of Ramble House titles—your shelves are abulge with them, of course!—turn to the collection of opening paragraphs from Harry’s novels in the bibliography at the end of this matchless tome, and compare the first lines of BOTTLED DEUCE with those of every other book he wrote during the year or so before and after. See the difference?
Police Captain Michael Simko, day-chief of Chicago Avenue Police Station, raised the telephone on his battered desk as it rang raucously.
“Chicago Avenue Police Station,” he said wearily.
One might almost believe Harry thought that if he aped the pb-original manner for a few pages, some editor would send him a contract and advance without bothering to read further! It didn’t work, of course. BOTTLED DEUCE was published nowhere—not in the U.S., not in England, not even in Spain where a number of his Fifties novels had been appearing as originals—until the Ramble House edition which ushers in this spanking-new year 2005.
Among the paperback thriller specialists of the Eisenhower years were some first-rate talents: David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Day Keene, Harry Whittington, John D. MacDonald, Jonathan Craig and Ed McBain, just to name seven. If what you want is not what these guys offered but the unreconstructed eccentric that was our Harry, fear not. Once having introduced his versions of pb-original Homicide cops (Louis TenEyck Ousley, skinny and wart-faced and called Lousy Lou by all and sundry—a nice role for Dan Duryea if by some miracle the movie rights in this never-published and by sane standards unpublishable book had been sold!—and Homer “Butterball” Tomaroy, who resembles a human dumpling and would have been a perfect part for Lou Costello), Harry quickly forgets what he started out to accomplish and the train of plot switches onto the tracks we know and love. Lythgoe Crockett, a naïve and paranoid young man living in a dump in Chicago’s Little Italy while trying to write the Great American Novel—his costume while in the throes of composition being bathing trunks and grass slippers!—apparently shot himself in the head in his apartment—all of whose doors and windows are locked from the inside!—shortly after receiving a package containing a deuce of diamonds in a bottle. What could have motived and motivated such an act? Then when Lousy Lou discovers that the gun dangling from Crockett’s nerveless hand is made of wax, the question morphs into: Why would anyone commit murder in such a cockamamie way, and how could both murderer and weapon have vanished from Crockett’s sealed apartment? In time the answers seem to emerge, and Rilla Kenshaw, girl magician, finds herself in jail and indicted for the crime by sadistic State’s Attorney Herman Kober, her only hope being the lone-wolf investigation of Lousy Lou, with sympathetic nods from Assistant State’s Attorney Chalfont Nortell. Eventually Harry allows himself to vent some pet peeves, notably the sex-obsessed nature of such current best-sellers as PHAETON PLACE and—talk about biting the hand he hoped would feed him!—of the novels published as 25-cent paperback originals. The case climaxes with a reconstruction of the crime in Crockett’s apartment, presided over by Lousy Lou but dominated by Sheridan Overturf, a bottom-rung magazine publisher whose like Harry had dealt with and worked for in his salad days as an editor.
If you’re familiar with the milestones of detective fiction, you won’t long wonder why in the late chapters Harry introduces—in his own inimitable way, by having other characters talk about him!—one Jamrock James, a.k.a. Old Sherlock Holmes the II’d. Any Sherlockian who gives the matter some thorght should be able to anticipate the ultimate gimmick in this book, although the trappings are a million times zanier than Conan Doyle’s. BOTTLED DEUCE isn’t in the same league with the Keeler Klassics of the Eisenhower era like THE STREET OF A THOUSAND EYES and THE RIDDLE OF THE WOODEN PARRAKEET, but it’s wackily satisfying in its own terms and all true Harryphiles will huzzah its availability at long last.