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THE FLYER HOLDUP
INTRODUCTION
by Francis M. Nevins
When did Keeler first dream up the unique kind of story structure that he continued to toy with till his death? We who love the wacky webwork world and the world-class whippo who created it should be celebrating that day every year. But, for the simple reason that no one knows precisely when the breakthrough came, we can’t.
His work records show that it happened in 1914, the year when he began to take off as a writer, completing 21 stories plus a 1-act play—92,000 words in all, including his two best known and most often reprinted short tales, The Services of an Expert and John Jones’ Dollar—and selling eight of those stories plus one he had written the year before, for a grand total of $88 in income from fiction. Apparently Harry’s record book organizes the data on his works in the order of their completion. The first seventeen entries for 1914 cover five tales of between 3000 and 4000 words apiece and twelve much shorter pieces. Then, probably rather late in the year, comes the entry for a 19,000-word tale he originally called The Corpse at No. 38. TA-DA! Something new under the sun is born. Keeler spent most of the next ten years writing increasingly longer and more brain-boggling specimens of webwork fiction. Later he recycled almost all of them. Some he kept at roughly their original length and incorporated into books like SING SING NIGHTS, others he expanded to gargantuan proportions and published as meganovels like THE MATILDA HUNTER MURDER and THE BOX FROM JAPAN. His first venture into the form he never recycled at all.
We know from his records that The Corpse at No. 38 sold in 1915 for $50, which means he was paid a bit more than two cents a word. To what magazine did he sell it? In what issue and under what title was it published? No one knows. Keeler’s records don’t provide that information for any of his stories, and no copy of the periodical in which this one appeared has yet been found. Did Harry later reprint it in his own magazine 10-Story Book as he did so much of his early short fiction? No one knows that either. If there is an issue that contains this tale, it hasn’t surfaced yet.
How then, you might be wondering, can Ramble House be publishing it today? Only because several decades later—in 1958, to be exact—Harry apparently realized that he still had a couple of unrecycled stories from his salad days and, retitling this one THE FLYER HOLD-UP, included it in a collection of three short novels which he hoped to sell to his Spanish publisher Instituto Editorial Reus. For reasons we shall never know, Reus passed on this one. But the text as Keeler retyped it in 1958 survives. By his rather slovenly standards it’s a very neat typescript, suggesting that he made no attempt to interpolate any new material that would update events from 1914 to the Fifties. Thank heaven! The delicious details of pre-World War I train and auto travel give the story a special cachet that I for one would hate to have lost.
THE FLYER HOLD-UP was Harry’s first foray into webwork but offers a surprising number of what we have come to know and love as his hallmarks. We have the whitebread protagonist around whom things happen—note that he gives his age as 25, almost exactly Harry’s own at the time!—plus a host of characters who are talked about but never come on stage, plus the occasional dollop of dialect, plus—last but far from least!—the deliciously screwball plot. Why did thieves raid the Chicago Flyer and steal nothing but the coffin containing the body of a young man who had died accidentally in Denver? What’s the connection between the robbery and the educated hobo known as Eastern Slim who was hitching a ride on the same train? Why when recovered does the coffin yield the body of a young woman in man’s clothing—a woman who had clearly died a violent death? The answers to these and other questions expose a karakteristik Keeler Krazy Kwilt of Koinkydink guaranteed to keep his readers kackling. True, FLYER isn’t as audacious as Harry’s later contributions to his self-created genre. Had he written it just a few years later it would certainly have been much longer and more complex. Take Don Carson’s girlfriend, for example, who plays no part in events and doesn’t even have a name. In mature Keeler she would have had a father or a brother, maybe both, and she and he or they would have been just as deeply ensnarled in the web as everyone else. And if FLYER had been written a little further along in Keeler’s kareer, the elements that might be described as lumps in its plot—like the misleading note in the pocket of dead body number one and the unexplained presence in the boondocks of the person who became dead body number two—would have been both motivated and motived to a fare-thee-well.
But in these decadent days when so many novels are ten times as long as THE FLYER HOLD-UP and at best one-tenth as complex and ingenious, you hold in your hands a delightful morsel indeed. Cherish it.