Whoosh goes the truck into the tunnel! This landmark novel incorporates Hazel's story "Spangles" and is the first of HSK's nine-volume circus series. Courtesy of Chris Mikul.
"Harry Stephen Keeler's many admirers - and they are legion both here and in the United States of America - have come to expect something distinctive and superlatively ingenious in the tangled web this clever author weaves in each new novel that comes from the Press in such regular intervals. It's a new Keeler! That is sufficient. There's bound to be something unusual and striking in each new mystery and its solution. Well, here's 'The Vanishing Gold Truck' and Harry Stephen Keeler's amazing solution of the extraordinary phenomena is just another illustration of the author's remarkable powers." (As Chris says: "Doesn't look like this fellow had actually read the book, does it?")
Born in Chicago in 1890, Keeler spent his childhood exclusively in this city, which was so beloved by the author that a large number of his works took place in and around it. In many of his novels, Keeler refers to Chicago as "the London of the west." The expression is explained in the opening of Thieves' Nights (1929):
"Here ... were seemingly the same hawkers ... selling the same goods ... here too was the confusion, the babble of tongues of many lands, the restless, shoving throng containing faces and features of a thousand racial castes, and last but not least, here on Halsted and Maxwell streets, Chicago, were the same dirt, flying bits of torn paper, and confusion that graced the junction of Middlesex and Whitechapel High streets far across the globe."
Other locales for Keeler novels include New Orleans and New York. In his later works, Keeler's settings are often more generic settings such as Big River, or a city in which all buildings and streets are either nameless or fictional. Keeler is known to have visited London at least once, but his occasional depictions of British characters are consistently implausible.
Me costó muchísimo acabarlo pero lo logré!! Por qué? Excesivas descripciones, además, una historia en la que los personajes y los eventos están conectados mediante una sucesión de coincidencias imposibles!!! Todo cuadra de una forma inverosímil, me cansó, pero para la época daba soluciones muy modernas!
Normally I find Keeler's vices charming but in this case page after page of story-within-story told in exposition heavy dialogue coded in broken, punctuation-pocked dialect broke me. DNF. Can't do it this week.