Item - The Riddle of the Traveling Skull

I picked up this book because of its author's connections with dime novels and story papers, an entirely different area of my studies, so I was taken completely off guard when I suddenly reached the "stop and guess the ending" page near the climax of the book. I can't say that this works very well as a mystery to solve -- the plot twists are so bizarre that it's hard for me to imagine anyone successfully determining the solution based solely on context clues -- but I nonetheless felt compelled to add it to the database. It's not the earliest example of the form (Ellery Queen, for example, was doing this kind of thing more prominently a few years earlier), but it's still a fairly early example of this type of literary novelty.

Gimmicks aside, the book is memorable and interesting, if not exactly what one would describe as "good." Indeed, it's sometimes hard to tell whether the author is writing poorly or toying with the reader for his own amusement. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter -- the result is over-the-top silly and bizarre, with strange twists and tangents, ludicrous character names, and a generally tongue-in-cheek tone. The main thing that drags it down from time to time is its inclusion of racist tropes and language that don't play well to the modern reader and add a bitter taste to something that would otherwise be fairly delightful fluff. If you can stomach those and view it as a product of its time, you might draw some entertainment value from it. It's certainly... distinctive.

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