By HARRY STEPHEN KEELER (Wildside Press; 1943/2018)
Another blast of dementia from the late Harry Stephen Keeler, who in this 1945 book offered up a mystery involving the fictional Japanese tome THE WAY OUT. A “Collection and Collation of All the Wisdom of Ancient China” that features in six Keeler novels, THE WAY OUT contains wisdom that invariably proves advantageous to Keeler’s plucky 1940s-era heroes. There’s also a focus on race relations that was as progressive in its time as it is regressive in ours.
As was the case with most Keeler books, THE CASE OF THE TWO STRANGE LADIES is extremely plot-driven, utilizing Keeler’s self-created webwork structure that juggles three interrelated plot strands. One of them involves a middle-aged American man purchasing THE WAY OUT from a London-based bookseller to get a twentyish woman to marry him, only to find that he doesn’t like the advice it imparts. The bookseller, one Mr. Solomon Silverspectacles(!), convinces the man that the book is incredibly rare when in fact he has several hundred copies stashed on hidden shelves within his store.
There’s also the Florida based Detective Bob Landell, who’s trying to figure out the whereabouts of a stolen necklace. Following a limerick contained in THE WAY OUT, Landell is inspired to close one eye while looking through a two-eyed microscope, in one of whose lenses the necklace is stashed.
Finally, there’s the mind-rattling account that begins and ends the book. It concerns Tommy Skirmont, a plucky newspaperman residing in a city in the American south—named, appropriately enough, Southern City–who finds he has to figure out the identities of two horribly mutilated women, one an aristocratic white gal and the other her (apparently) black servant, in order to keep his job and marry the woman he loves. Solving this case is possible only by perusing THE WAY OUT, which inspires Tommy to read up on carnivals and albinism—as, it transpires, the women were actually sisters employed by a freak show.
Further lunacy is provided by a shocking double murder, multi-racial family ties, transposed heads and a public display of the dead women (which is segregated due to the fact that the corpses are of different races). Needless to add, only Harry Stephen Keeler could have conceived such a tale, which can bolster the view that he was either the Ed Wood of mystery writers or one of the great geniuses of American literature.