JOHN KEEL NOT AN AUTHORITY ON ANYTHING

Sondrio

As John said in the letter I posted last week, he was mentioned in several books, including Cocktail Party for the Author by Alex Jackinson. Jackinson’s book is a memoir of his ten years as a literary agent, published by Challenge Press in 1964. He was John’s agent in the ’50s; he advised John on writing for men’s magazines, and eventually sold Jadoo to Julian Messner. I found a copy of the book (it’s not rare) and read it. He devotes the third chapter to John, heading it with a question that must occur to many readers of Jadoo: “How True Are the True Adventures?” The answer, not surprisingly, is rather complicated.

Jackinson seems to have been an interesting character. He came from a Russian Jewish family, who emigrated to the Bronx in 1913. His father was a garment cutter; his uncle, Morris Terman, was an editor and writer active in left-wing politics and Yiddish literature. Young Alex became a cutter like his father (he specialized in furs), but was inspired by his uncle’s literary interests. He wrote (and sold) work in many genres: poetry, song lyrics, romance and detective stories. He opened a literary agency in 1953, and was particularly sympathetic to small publishers and young writers. He began by helping his fellow poets to write commercially.

John contacted Jackinson in 1954, fresh from the army, and determined to travel and write. Jackinson thought John’s travel articles weren’t polished enough for the slick magazines like Post or Collier’s, and that he needed “an apprenticeship in the lesser books. For him that meant the men’s group.” There was, he told him, a ready market “for authentic and exciting first-person adventure yarns, so that armchair-tied clerks might turn into Lowell Thomases.”

John was willing, asking, “How much must be true? How much can be invented?” Jackinson replied “with what knowledge I had. Nothing must be offered which could be proven wrong. Each adventure had to read as though it might have happened.”

John set to work, writing and rewriting. “Keel caught the ‘formula’ very ably, and there is most definitely a formula involved. Because he wrote in a way that generated excitement, and because he was meeting a market need, editors were ready to meet him halfway.” After several pieces had been published, Jackinson suggested a book, which John first called Pattern for Adventure. An early pitch went nowhere; a year later, Jackinson felt he had “something submittable,” and set up a meeting with Howard Goodkind of Julian Messner.

Goodkind was interested, but asked, “How do we know this guy isn’t lying?” He was understandably wary; some popular books had turned out to be hoaxes, much to their publishers’ embarrassment: the memoirs of Joan Lowell and Trader Horn, for example. Jackinson explained that John mixed fact and fiction: “No incident is invented, just built dramatically from something that happened.” Goodkind decided to take the book, adding, “I’ll say this–he’s certainly a good writer.”

Jackinson stresses, “Keel achieved in months what most writers do not achieve in years,” although, of course, John had been writing seriously for much longer.

When John returned to NY, Jackinson set up lunch with Goodkind, who was surprised that the supposed swashbuckler was quiet and “skinny enough to be compared to a banana.” Goodkind returned to the question of the book’s veracity.

So, the percentage of Jadoo that is true is either sixty or eighty per cent; take your choice. But the other per cent is the embroidery; he really did have those adventures. Jackinson also reveals how much money Jadoo made. Comparing it to his other clients’ books, he says: “Jadoo did much better, but far short of expectations. With all the extra [magazine] sales, total income for Keel was around three thousand.” In the last chapter, he sums up John’s career after that: his subsequent dry spell, his plans to travel to Timbuctu or Yemen, and his work for television. His interest in UFOs was yet to come.

John himself wrote about this period in his article “Bosoms, Blood, and Baloney.” He also kept a binder labeled “1955,” in which he kept all the stories he wrote that year, with notes on the magazines that bought them and what they paid, as well as feedback from editors. Here’s a note from Jackinson about “The Men with the X-Ray Eyes,” which had been rejected by True. John rewrote it, and did eventually sell it to Man’s Challenge for $150. As Jackinson notes about John’s success in the book, “It was not easy. Nothing pertaining to writing is.”

We have another odd item from John’s early career. In his article “Bosoms, Blood, & Baloney” for Writer’s Digest, he said he heard a story from a ship’s doctor about a man who fought a tiger by thrusting his arm down its throat. John turned it into a story of his own, with the usual lashings of local color. Editors refused it, however, insisting the protagonist had to use a knife to make it believable. John obliged, and the story was published in the July, 1957 issue of Escape to Adventure, under his favorite pseudonym, Randolph Halsey-Quince. The curious thing about all this is that the magazine actually published it the way John wrote it originally, without the added bit about a knife. Did another editor like the first version better? Did John remember it wrong? Maybe we can just assume that communication often became scrambled between Alex Jackinson (John’s agent), the editors of the adventure magazines, and John, roaming through India.

Here’s John’s original typescript, and the beginning of the article as printed. The illegible phrase on the third page should read: “There are many rivers and swamp areas in Sunderban […]”

We have another story for Jadoo fans. John wrote “The Devil’s Knife” in Bagdad on March 17, 1955. He didn’t note any sale on the typescript, so it’s likely his agent Alex Jackinson couldn’t sell it. It’s a gripping tale in which John is accused of seducing an Izeide (that is, Yazidi) woman and must defend his life with a khanjer. Like many of his submissions to the men’s magazines at the time, it mixes fiction and fact, as the market demanded: a fictional story in a factual setting.

Here’s one for all the Jadoo fans. This lively little story is obviously fictional, but based on some of John’s real experiences in India.  The combination of fact and fiction in some of his work for the men’s magazines became somewhat of a problem for his agent. For more on that, see this excerpt from Alex Jackinson’s Cocktail Party for the Author. And for John’s own reflections on that part of his career, see this article from Writer’s Digest.

John labeled this “#1” because it was the first article he wrote after moving to Barcelona. It was, of course, too fictional to be included in Jadoo.

I’ll post this in two parts. Meanwhile, Happy, Merry, and New!

In 1955, John left the army and started wandering through the Middle East. He was badly in need of money, and so he also started sending articles to his agent in the US, Alex Jackinson, to sell to men’s adventure magazines. He carefully kept all of his submissions, with notes on sales and rejections. His first attempt, “Creeping Death of the Nile,” was abandoned, but he had better luck with the second, “End of the Hunt,” which sold to Sport Life. Here, then, is the first installment  of John’s first sale to the men’s magazine market. He was not, by the way, “somewhere in Africa,” and certainly not in Tanganyika, but typing away in a hotel in Cairo.

This letter of John’s was published in the Spring 1968 issue of Saucer News, at that time edited by Gray Barker. John is, understandably, exasperated at all of the rumors circulating about him. The books he mentions deserve a few footnotes.

Gardner Soule wrote on many subjects, including Columbus, Eisenhower, the West, and cryptozoology, for both adults and children. Trail of the Abominable Snowman was published by Putnam in 1966; I haven’t read it.

J. Mortimer Sheppard had met John in Baghdad; as usual, John kept his business card. Sheppard wrote for a number of magazines, including Fate. He had a particular interest in the Sahara, and at one point crossed part of it in a land yacht. The original title for the proposed book was Sailing Sahara’s Sands, but it was eventually published as Sahara Adventure (Adventurer’s Club, 1959), since his wind-sailing exploits only filled a few chapters.

Alex Jackinson was a literary agent, whose clients included both Sheppard and John. Cocktail Party for the Author (Challenge Press, 1964) is a memoir of his career. I took the trouble to find a copy (it’s not rare) and read it. He devotes a chapter to John, since Jackinson coached him on writing for the men’s adventure market, placed the stories that John sent from his travels, and found a publisher for Jadoo. He has some interesting things to say about that phase of John’s career, so I’ll post some excerpts nest week.

As the second (and last) chapter of John’s unfinished spy story concludes, secret agent Al Mercy and his contact, Gerda Feldstein, wrestle naked for her Luger, before settling for naked kissing. Damn this war!

In the first chapter of John’s unfinished and untitled spy story, WW2 secret agent Al Mercy parachuted into a nudist colony on a Scandinavian island. As the second (and last) chapter begins, he discusses his mission with his contact, the beautiful and naked Gerda Feldstein. Assassination, mutual suspicion, and sexual tension lie ahead…

The exciting serial of Al Mercy continues! In the rest of the first chapter, Al Mercy, an American secret agent in World War 2, after having parachuted into a Scandinavian nudist colony, meets his contact.

For those of you just joining us, John wrote two chapters of an untitled spy story, which I’m posting here. I have no idea what he meant to do with it.

John apparently started this spy novel in the late ’60s, judging from the other papers in the folder. Maybe it was a first attempt at Love That Spy, maybe not. At any rate, he wrote two chapters, in which secret agent Al Mercy parachutes onto a nudist colony on a Scandinavian island in World War 2. There he joins forces with the beautiful Gerda Feldstein to find and kill General Hans Von Passel. It’s pretty silly, but you may welcome some diversion in these troubled times. John didn’t give it a title, so I’ll just call it after its dashing hero.