Book Reviews
The Green Jade Hand
By Harry Stephen Keeler
Dutton, 1930, 327 pages
Reviewed by Jamie Agnew
Owner of Aunt Agatha's, a mystery & true crime book store
Book stores were born independent, but now lie everywhere in chains. What's happened in the book world isn't that different from the McDonaldization of the rest of the retail world - your local store is going the way of the corner grocery store, hamburger stand, hardware store, etc. "Death to Mom and Pop's" as one particularly jocular executive at a local chain allegedly likes to croon. But the problem with this Wall Street bull rush is that books aren't rutabagas, and draconian efficiency and centralization may not be the best thing for the fragile and impossible world which is the printed word.
Now instead of thousands of stores deciding what books to buy and return, there is one person and/or computer who decides for thousands It's great to have a store with 100,000 titles, but not so great when every store has basically the same books and the ones that don' t fit in the title da ta base go out of print. The supermarket approach works sometimes - there are books that belong in the dumpster that most unsold paperbacks go into (to save money only the covers are returned to the publisher), but there are others, weird strains whose beauty cannot be made out by the pale screens of artificial intelligence. 1 guess what l'm really worried about is if there's room in this brave new book world for a writer like Harry Stephen Keeler.
Keeler (1890-1967) was an original, one of those pure, insane products of America, the kind of quirky genius whose bizarre charms are too subtle for today's quick cut/book/coffee/media world. None of his 49 titles now reside in chain bookstores, or even in the Ann Arbor Public Library. The only place they still weave their strange patterns to the public is in used bookstores, and even there they're not always easy to find. The earliest of his books l've been able to find is his eighth, "The Green Jade Hand," and it's the most "traditional" mystery of his collection. The plot revolves around two objects; a priceless book, "De Devinis Institutionalibus Adversum Gentes," stolen at the behest of a rich collector, and a tiny, six-fingered green jade hand, found by a mysterious tramp in his chop suey. They end up together in the safe of Casimer Jech, a curio dealer who then ends up outside the safe, shot dead.
The traditional literary crime-solving begins, but in the disturbingly unique Keeler way. A knowit-all amateur detective, Oliver Oliver (Character appellation was one of Keeler's peculiar strengths) discovers that the jade hand is the solution to a Chinatown mystery and disappears on an off-stage "Gold Bug"-style treasure hunt. The murder is then "solved" in the usual Holmesian manner, by the minute examination of esoteric clues, the meaning of which is pedantically divined by an arrogant chief of detectives.
Then, in an astonishing scene, the Chiefs solution is contradicted and parodied unwittingly by a "feeble-minded" janitor, whose antics are being offered as a humorous performance designed to raise funds for the plainclothes policeman's ball. The janitor's looney solution is then revealed to be the right one, and, in a final capper, the tramp who found the jade hand is revealed to be - well you just have to read it. And this is one of Keeler's most conventional mysteries. The total effect is deeply subversive of traditional mystery, with its coincidences, hyper-rational detectives and manipulated happy endings - here shown literally to be a tale told by an idiot.
Keeler's other books are cut from the same cloth (one of his titles is "The Mysterious Mr. 1"), the pattern growing more outlandish with time. The prose is as convoluted as the plots, whose colliding elements were the result of Keeler basing them on odd newspaper clippings picked at random from his collection - a nearly version of William Burroughs's celebrated "cut-up" method.
The end result is not really comic, but rather surreal, as events proceed with inexorable dream logic in a world where identity is fluid yet crucial. His work can only be understood by experiencing it - but that's a more improbable event as time goes by , as improbable as the true identity of my favorite Keeler character, Madame Mercedes, the handcuff queen, herself a victim of chains.