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INTRODUCTION TO

 THE CASE OF THE TRANSPARENT NUDE

 

Francis M. Nevins

 

The late 1950s were boom times for one of the newest subgenres of crime fiction, the police procedural. Perhaps the best-known and certainly the longest lived series in this category was Ed McBain’s cycle of novels about the 87th Precinct, which is still going strong today almost half a century later, but there were a host of other procedural writers like Hillary Waugh, Jonathan Craig and Lawrence Treat, not to mention TV shows like DRAGNET and THE LINE-UP and THE NAKED CITY. Harry Stephen Keeler never allowed commercial trends to affect how he wrote, but once in a rare while he did permit such crass considerations to exert a modicum of influence on what he wrote. I suspect this is why urban police detectives have unusually strong roles in such late Keeler novels as THE STRAW HAT MURDERS, which Harry completed on October 14, 1958, and Ramble House’s latest revival, THE CASE OF THE TRANSPARENT NUDE, which he finished on October 26 of the same year. (Whether he wrote the entire book in those twelve days is anyone’s guess.) Not that the dimmest reader could mistake either of these novels for a procedural!

How then is one to describe TRANSPARENT NUDE? Flamboyant? Grotesque? Too weird to have been written by anyone on land or sea other than our Harry? Those will do for starters. The first half, set 25 years in the past, recounts how Helmon Hobersteed, lecherous chief of Chicago’s Homicide Investigation Division, and Blackaby Oxnard, the young Cook County coroner who is Hobersteed’s sexual rival, investigate what is at first reported as the accidental death of a young woman in a steam vapor cabinet. Opening the device, the men are flabbergasted to discover that, although the woman’s head is sticking out of the cabinet top and her toes out of the bottom, the rest of her is, if I may borrow an oft-recycled Keelerism, non est. Hence the title, or rather the two alternate titles Harry gave the novel, apparently uncertain whether the “six blackrobes” in charge of censorship in Generalissimo Franco’s puritanical Spain would okay a book with that lust-arousing final word in its name. And he was right, since the book was published by Instituto Editorial Reus in 1963 as EL CASO DE LA MUJER TRANSPARENTE, which translates Harry’s alternate title THE CASE OF THE TRANSPARENT WOMAN. This first edition in English restores the more daring option.

After the opening scenes we leap forward a quarter century. Hobersteed has been retired to the funny farm—having contracted the delusion that he too is transparent!—and the enigma remains unsolved. Then Jonathan Palay—anti-vivisection crusader, true-crime writer, and the present head of Chicago’s H.I.D.—receives a strange letter from a circus fat lady and finally hears from her outsized lips the story of the unlucky butcher Carl Schliefgeisser and of his entanglement with the transparent nude (or, if you too are puritanical, transparent woman). The fat lady’s conversation with Palay begins partway through Chapter XII and continues for more than 100 pages till the last word of Chapter XXIX, which is also the end of the book. The ingredients of her tale include a house whose master bedroom lies half in Pennsylvania and half in Ohio, a brothel full of physical freaks (where in Keeler have we seen these before?), a religious sect that believes the legal punishment of murderers to be against God’s will, the old reliable twins who don’t know of each other’s existence, the never-seen but much-discussed Aunt Sillygalilly, a South American country which doesn’t recognize U.S. marriages as legal (unnamed but probably the Republic of San Do Mar from previous Keeler novels), and a boardinghouse keeper who throws out all her roomers at regular intervals. The whole farrago is tied up into Keeler’s usual neat but wacky package with the help of two whopping surprises in the final pages.

Amid the wild and woolly plot elements and the gratuitous swipes at the people who were then called Negroes—in the controversy over Keeler’s alleged racism this book is definitely an exhibit for the prosecution!—come turns of phrase that only Harry could have dreamed up or set down. One of my favorites rears its head in Chapter I where Hobersteed is described as “in the position of being able to walk erect and upright between the legs of the man who was himself able to walk, with a silk hat on, under a snake.” There are others in this vein, but I’ll leave the pleasant chore of spotting them to you the reader.

And—since I love Keeler’s longwindedness but wouldn’t want to contract the disease myself!—you may begin right now.

 

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