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The Skull in the Box #1-4
The Skull In The Box TPB
A man is standing on a street corner holding a crimson hatbox. An archbishop walks up to him and asks, “What’s in the box, my son?” The man replies, “Wah Lee’s skull. I cracked Vann’s pete.”
From this unlikely scenario, Harry Stephen Keeler has fashioned a four-volume courtroom saga that is unique in American literature. Originally published in the 30s as four books:
THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC EARDRUMS
THE MAN WITH THE CRIMSON BOX
THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN SPECTACLES
THE CASE OF THE LAVENDER GRIPSACK
it is now, for the first time, published in one trade pa-perback or hardback volume. Some people consider the SKULL IN THE BOX series Harry Stephen Keeler’s masterpiece.
There are 350,000 words on the 436 pages in this book. Read them and you’ll know why Bill Pronzini called Keeler “the first great alternative writer.”
From this unlikely scenario, Harry Stephen Keeler has fashioned a four-volume courtroom saga that is unique in American literature. Originally published in the 30s as four books:
THE MAN WITH THE MAGIC EARDRUMS
THE MAN WITH THE CRIMSON BOX
THE MAN WITH THE WOODEN SPECTACLES
THE CASE OF THE LAVENDER GRIPSACK
it is now, for the first time, published in one trade pa-perback or hardback volume. Some people consider the SKULL IN THE BOX series Harry Stephen Keeler’s masterpiece.
There are 350,000 words on the 436 pages in this book. Read them and you’ll know why Bill Pronzini called Keeler “the first great alternative writer.”
Unknown Binding
First published April 14, 2009
9 people want to read
About the author
Harry Stephen Keeler
167 books55 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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September 28, 2014
Harry Stephen Keeler is a genius. He's also insane. So, although this book is much too long, rambling, filled with dead ends and pointless red herrings, complex to the point of needing a spreadsheet to keep track of all the subplots, and filled with page after frustrating page of unreadable dialect writing, the conclusion is so brilliantly tied together that it's hard not to love it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review