It would be interesting to learn what inspired this 1957 novel by Keeler, which remained unpublished in English during his lifetime, and long afterward.
The standard Keeler hero, struggling young architect Jarth Kilgo, faces the standard Keeler problem, a crazy will-condition that stands in the way of his inheritance of a $100,000 bequest that is rightfully his. In order to obtain his money, Kilgo must somehow demonstrate that a certain night-club mentalism act, "The Spheres of Sing," is not the result of genuine psychic ability possessed by the two presenters, but instead depends upon trickery. In an attempt to do this, Kilgo makes contact with the semi-retired developer of the act, Wong Shing Li.
After some preliminaries, about the first 123 of the book's 225 pages are taken up by a presentation/recreation of the act by Wong and an assistant, Mr. Him. Next Kilgo goes on a wild goose chase to interview a professor who has read one copy of an impossibly rare Chinese book which supposedly presents the "physics" behind the "genuine" telepathy of the Spheres of Sing. This gobbledygook explanation, which basically extends from page 125 to 157, turns out, as in a number of other Keeler works, to depend on the "magical" properties of an object which is (1) absolutely unique, and (2) has no known, possible or imaginable function.
When Kilgo, now honestly convinced that he has hopelessly lost $100,000, brings his plight to the attention of the kindly Wong; Wong then conveniently restages the entire act for the same small audience, now explaining precisely how each stunt is done. The intricate spoken code, which has been the basis of such acts since the 1700s, is explained in tremendous detail. [I wonder if the novel was inspired by HSK seeing such an act at a Chicago nightclub some time in the 1940s or early 1950s (when a number of different husband-and-wife teams were performing)?] This explanation takes up pages 169 to 225.
It wouldn't be an HSK novel if there weren't a preposterous drug with impossibly precise and predictable effects involved somehow, and in this case it's a vile Chinese liqueur called muikwuila, which actually at novel's end helps the hero win the girl he has recently fallen in love with. He drugs her! Happy ending!
If you have a taste for "off the beaten track," well, Harry Stephen Keeler gets as far off of it as any normal human reader could ever hope to cope with. Here's your chance to read just such a novel, unavailable in English from the time of its composition in 1957, until about 2002 when this TPB first appeared.
