"IT WAS LIKE TRYING TO THINK ABOUT THE SQUARE ROOT OF MINUS ZERO"

There's this guy, The Youngest Crotchety Old Man I Know, and he stumbled over this other (and very dead) guy, Harry Stephen Keeler and pointed him out to me. After reading one paragraph of this guy's work, I was instantly run over...err...won over. He's like the Grant-Morrison-with-a-nail-gun-injury-to-his-cerebellum of early pulp crime novels or something. I immediately secured the McSweeney's edition of The Riddle of the Travelling Skull, from which this is a snippet, thickly encrusted with a dried-up ichor of weird.

From the aforementioned tome:

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!

Thank Viking Jesus that someone in the early twentieth century had enough dain bramage to publish this guy who, not surprisingly, was experimented upon in insane asylums.