Harry Stephen Keeler - Sing Sing Nights

Harry Stephen Keeler's Sing Sing Nights is one of his most unusual books. The premise is highly implausible, yet it perfectly reflects Keeler's boundless imagination. Three men have been sentenced to death for murder, but only one of them is actually innocent. In an effort to prove his innocence, the prisoners decide to tell three stories to the night guard. It is an unlikely narrative framework, but once the reader accepts it, the novel unfolds as three almost self-contained novellas.

The first story is by far the strongest. It revolves around the theft of an expensive necklace belonging to a wealthy young woman during a masquerade ball. This is the closest the book comes to a conventional detective story, and its mystery is both entertaining and well-paced.

The second tale is somewhat weaker but still intriguing. A newspaper reporter is assigned to interview a Chinese princess who is travelling through the United States. Like many of Keeler's works, it relies on exotic settings and unlikely coincidences, elements that fascinated the author throughout his career.

The third story is, in my opinion, the weakest. A man is horribly injured in an accident at a circus. At the same time, a monkey involved in the same accident suffers irreversible brain damage. An eccentric group of doctors performs a bizarre operation, transplanting the healthy human brain into the monkey's body. Unable to accept life as an intelligent ape and realizing that he has no future in the outside world, the protagonist agrees to work for the circus. Eventually, another extraordinary operation takes place: the scientist transplants his brain once again, this time into the healthy body of a dead nobleman who had stolen his fiancée. When the protagonist awakens, he discovers that he has regained a human body—and, with it, his lost love.

This final story abandons detective fiction almost entirely in favor of grotesque science fiction. While imaginative, it stretches credibility far beyond the limits established by the earlier stories and is the least satisfying of the three.

The framing narrative involving the three condemned prisoners is also somewhat disappointing. Keeler never fully resolves it in a convincing way, leaving the ending feeling abrupt and rather unclear. This is characteristic of his fiction in general: his greatest strength lies in his inexhaustible imagination and unpredictable plotting, while psychological depth, realistic characterization, and tightly constructed endings are often secondary.

Sing Sing Nights is therefore an uneven but fascinating novel. It showcases both Keeler's greatest virtues and his most obvious flaws. Readers looking for a conventional detective novel may be frustrated, but those willing to follow Keeler's eccentric imagination will find a work unlike almost anything else in Golden Age crime fiction.