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Tuddleton Trotter #3
The Trap
Sheriff Lafe Whitecotton has a problem: sleepwalking Whisperwell Jenkins has stolen and burned some important evidence—as well as $500 in cold cash!—from his office and now everyone blames him for just about everything. Throw in a mysterious letter that claims that a book called THE CHINESE CHARACTER holds the clue to a murder and a doddering old detective named Tuddleton Trotter and you have the makings of one of the goldangdest Keeler novels that never made it to print—until now. How Lafe and Tuddleton band together to solve this case is a tale only webworking Harry Stephen Keeler could have devised.
Paperback
First published June 17, 2006
About the author
Harry Stephen Keeler
184 books56 followersBorn 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.
"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.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
August 9, 2026
I love Keeler, so three stars is a baseline for the enjoyment I get from this avuncular avant-gardist, after reading at least 33 of his books. Yet you see I go no further here.
Pros: Longer than most other random Keelers you pull from a purple hat, at around 180 pages, over the typical 120 (aside from the megaworks). Extremely cat positive, which made the whole thing worthwhile for me. Also, Tuddleton Trotter is a great character. And somehow I may have missed other works he appears in, but I will seek them out! Him and Quiribus Brown, man.
Cons: At the end of the book, I thought very hard, and perhaps it was the fast-paced moment of my life in which I read it, but the webwork felt like parts didn't connect. As we got near the end, I stopped being sure why things were happening this way. Also the main sheriff, Lafe Whitecotton, seemed oddly inconsistent, mostly in his dialect, which at times grew so thick that reading his words was like wading through mud. Then his hick brain would clear right up when there was doings a-transpiring, and he spoke more smoothly.
This was apparently the final book that Keeler even attempted to publish in English - after this he sold works for Portuguese and Spanish, if I recall, but really I have no idea how they would handle his writing style. English would seem to be the ONLY language in which Keeler has a shot at demonstrating his weird craft, and the Brits didn't want this spicy American tale about an extremely old dude who teams up with a hick sheriff - although, "team up" is a serious stretch. Their storylines are more ships in the night than I am used to, even with Keeler.
It loses another minor point because I thought it would be a Keelerian Western. But it wasn't.
Pros: Longer than most other random Keelers you pull from a purple hat, at around 180 pages, over the typical 120 (aside from the megaworks). Extremely cat positive, which made the whole thing worthwhile for me. Also, Tuddleton Trotter is a great character. And somehow I may have missed other works he appears in, but I will seek them out! Him and Quiribus Brown, man.
Cons: At the end of the book, I thought very hard, and perhaps it was the fast-paced moment of my life in which I read it, but the webwork felt like parts didn't connect. As we got near the end, I stopped being sure why things were happening this way. Also the main sheriff, Lafe Whitecotton, seemed oddly inconsistent, mostly in his dialect, which at times grew so thick that reading his words was like wading through mud. Then his hick brain would clear right up when there was doings a-transpiring, and he spoke more smoothly.
This was apparently the final book that Keeler even attempted to publish in English - after this he sold works for Portuguese and Spanish, if I recall, but really I have no idea how they would handle his writing style. English would seem to be the ONLY language in which Keeler has a shot at demonstrating his weird craft, and the Brits didn't want this spicy American tale about an extremely old dude who teams up with a hick sheriff - although, "team up" is a serious stretch. Their storylines are more ships in the night than I am used to, even with Keeler.
It loses another minor point because I thought it would be a Keelerian Western. But it wasn't.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review