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THE CASE OF THE 2-HEADED IDIOT
Introduction
Francis M. Nevins
In his more than half a century as a paper-blackener—his own term for how he made his living!—Harry Stephen Keeler wrote many novels that might be described as component parts of a series. But, as all true Harrians know, the recurring “characters” in most of his series were non-human: a book, a house, an island, a skull, whatever. Only a small number of homines sapientes appear in two or more Keeler novels. If we eliminate the bad guys—like Hong Lei Chung, grand poohbah of the Tong of Lean Grey Rats Who Swarm the World!—most of Harry’s walking and talking series figures are, to one degree or another, self-portraits. Certainly none more so than Angus MacWhorter, owner of MacWhorter’s Mammoth Motorized Shows, a.k.a. The Biggest Little-Circus on Earth, who leads his troupe again and again through the rocky absurdities of Keeler Kountry on journeys from nowhere to nowhere while the world turns cartwheels around him.
THE CASE OF THE TWO-HEADED IDIOT—by far the most Keeleresque of the three tentative titles Harry attached to the typescript, the others being BREAKFAST AT THE WARINGS and CURIO, CURIO, BUY ME A CURIO!—is the seventh and last book in the MacWhorter series, and one of the daffiest. Angus, now almost 70 as Harry himself was at the time he wrote the novel and desperately in need of cash, is offered $3000 by a Chicago law firm in return for permission to let the firm’s unnamed client have a private 10-minute session with a bicephalic child who had once been exhibited in MacW’s circus. Angus sends his young assistant Brock Colburn to Baghdad-on-the-Lakes to look into this offer but Brock happens to be an escaped convict wanted in Chicago for murder—a crime which of course he didn’t commit. I don’t think it’s revealing too much if I mention that the first person he meets in Chicago turns out to hold the key not only to the idiot child mystery but also to Brock’s little difficulties with the justice system—and winds up becoming his wife too! As she suggests late in the proceedings, “there was some sort of cosmic beneficence about the whole set-up, wasn’t there?—a mystic or philosopher would have said that it was all a ‘perfect pattern’....” But these lucky resolutions, the product of Keeler’s lifelong affection for the novels of Charles Dickens, are reached only after 60 chapters filling almost 350 closely printed pages with deliciously intertwined subplots which demonstrate once again that even in his last years Harry remained the great wack of American letters.
Besides being the swan song of the MacWhorter series, IDIOT is the last Keeler novel for which some (although apparently not very much) collaborative input was provided by his first wife, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, who died of cancer on May 27, 1960. Much of the book seems to have written during her final illness, which must have driven Harry to distraction. His work records reveal that he completed the book in 1960 but he doesn’t record the exact date as he had done for dozens of previous novels. The typescript of IDIOT is rife with careless typographical errors and other gaffes which Ramble House has mercifully spared the gentle reader. The alert Keelerite will notice that the names of most of the characters in IDIOT are by Harry’s standards as normal as John Smith and Mary Jones. This too I attribute to his situation in 1960. With the woman he’d been married to for more than 40 years dying by inches, it’s small wonder that he couldn’t focus on conjuring up names like Gonwyck Schwaaa and Mushroom-Ears Giegenjack. The miracle is that he managed to dream up and work out the wild and woolly plot in which you are about to find yourself entangled.
An innocent man convicted of murder who escapes before he can be put in prison makes an unusual Keeler protagonist. Might Brock Colburn have been the inspiration for Dr. Richard Kimble, the unforgettable man-on-the-run portrayed by David Janssen in that classic 1960s TV series THE FUGITIVE? At first glance it seems possible. IDIOT was completed a few years before that series debuted, and in a “Walter Keyhole” newsletter sent to friends and acquaintances and total strangers very late in 1960 Harry claimed that the novel was already being translated into Spanish for publication by Instituto Editorial Reus. But in fact it never appeared in Spain or anywhere else until now, so there’s no way on earth it could have inspired THE FUGITIVE or anything else. Nevertheless, if you buy into the wacky Dickensian metaphysics of Keeler’s universe—and if you don’t, how the hell did you stumble on this book?—I suspect you’ll agree with me that, among Harry’s late novels, THE CASE OF THE TWO-HEADED IDIOT is one of the most satisfying.