Harry Stephen Keeler

Harry Stephen Keeler (November 3, 1890 – January 22, 1967) was a prolific but little-known American author of mysteries and science fiction.

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.

Keeler's mother was a widow several times over who operated a boarding house popular with theatrical performers. Beginning around age sixteen, Keeler wrote a steady stream of original short stories and serials that were subsequently published in many small pulp magazines of the day. He attended the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), graduating with a degree in electrical engineering. When Keeler was about twenty, his mother committed him to an insane asylum for reasons unknown, thus fostering his interest in the insane, insane asylums and the sane who had been committed to such places, as well as a lifelong violent antipathy towards the psychiatric profession.

After graduation, he took a job as an electrician in a steel mill, working by day and writing by night. One of Keeler's early works was the science fiction story "John Jones' Dollar", about a dollar invested, which grows to a vast sum due to compound interest over thousands of years. It was at this time that Keeler met his future wife, Hazel Goodwin, whom he married in 1919.

Eight of Keeler's earliest works first appeared in pulp fiction magazines like Complete Novel and Top Notch.

...
Wikipedia