Day Keene was the pseudonym of Gunard Hjerstedt (1904-1969). Hjerstedt was born in Chicago and became an actor in repertory theatre in the early 1920s. When some of his friends decided to try movies, Hjerstedt flipped a coin to decide between acting and writing. Writing won. In 1940 he started contributing to pulp magazines. His first stories were published in Ace G-Man Stories and Dime Mystery and later he graduated to Black Mask and Dime Detective. Later Keene moved to Florida, where he made the transition from pulps to paperback originals in the late 1940s. He also befriended young writers who had moved there, among them Talmage Powell and John D. MacDonald. His only series character was detective Johnny Aloha, who appeared in two novels.

Some of Keene's books are being reissued by Point Blank.

Mike Grost on Day Keene

Day Keene's puzzle plots often turn on identity. They also involve people in desperate emotional circumstances, often quite sympathetically. "Remember the Night" (1949) is a borderline impossible crime tale - not in the sense a locked room or other physical but seemingly impossible crime takes place in it, but in that its protagonist is a carnival mind reader with apparent psychic powers. Off trail impossible crime tales were regularly written by both Cornell Woolrich and Fredric Brown. Its title was used for a 1940 film written by Preston Sturges, but it was probably freshly dreamed up again by Keene. "Night" has a great deal of sociological detail about the 1940's. It also has vivid characters and an emotionally involving plot. Keene's work has the concern for public corruption found in hard-boiled fiction of the era, but fortunately is lacking in the swaggering machismo and cynical alienation that often afflicts the protagonists of that genre.

Keene's "The Bloody Tide" (1950) is a very late Dime Detective story, that continues the hard-boiled tradition. The story is rich in Florida atmosphere, somewhat reminiscent of Lester Dent's Oscar Sail stories (1936). Its plot has a fair number of unexpected events along the way. This is a Keene tradition: the use of several superimposed mystery plots in one tale. There is a crime in the past, a crime in the present, an on going illegal activity, and more crimes discovered by the hero at the end of the tale. No one could say that Keene short changed his readers, when it came to sheer volume of plotting. Unfortunately, the solution to the mystery seems obvious. The hero here is married, and there is a post war emphasis on marriage and settling down with a family in the suburbs that seems extremely 1950ish. Like the also married hero of "Remember the Night" (1948), the protagonist here is a returning veteran. The hero is also pitted against the police in this tale, who are considerably more honest than those in "Remember the Night". Both stories teach the hero numerous moral lessons along the way, and look at a basically decent man who has stumbled into a life a crime, and who is trying to reform.

Keene wrote numerous novels in the 1950's, many paperback originals. Wake Up to Murder (1952) shows features of the Woolrich school. These include: a death-house countdown, trying to gather evidence that will prevent an innocent person from being executed for a crime they did not commit; a hero who has an alcoholic blackout, losing his memory of a night, and waking up the next day in a puzzling mystery with no memory of the night before; men and women who become amateur detectives to try to solve a case in which they have a personal stake; a concern with ordinary people, who are just getting by, and their financial problems; brutal police who persecute the hero, and yet who sometimes also help him; bizarre situations; disappearing women who need to be hunted down by the hero, despite skepticism by everyone around him; vividly described settings, here of the Gulf coast of Florida, where Keene lived; nocturnal adventures; an exploration of many parts of a community, from ordinary people to the homes of the rich; emotionally obsessed people; people in desperate trouble. All of these are features found in Woolrich. Also like Woolrich, the book mixes genuine mystery in with its suspense.

Wake Up to Murder features a traditional, pleasant mystery story construction, in which we keep learning more and more about a mysterious situation as the story progresses. Keene keeps coming up with unexpected relationships between his characters. These and the many unexpected story twists show ingenuity.

If Wake Up to Murder (1952) is Keene's version of Woolrich's "hero with a blackout" tales, then Who Has Wilma Lathrop? (1955) is Keene's take on another perennial Woolrich theme, the "disappearing woman". Unfortunately, this novel is so grim and nightmarish that it has little entertainment value. It is also sordid in its treatment of crimes inflicted on women by the male villains in the book. However, it can be argued that these sections gave visibility to problems that were only much later made into political issues by women's lib, and that Keene was ahead of his time in his concern for women's issues.