Publisher/author/Mysterious Bookshop maven Otto Penzler's line of American Mystery Classics has been re-printing a growing number of fine classic crime stories over the past year or so. A check back into the Classic Mysteries vault has yielded another excellent example, long out-of-print but now available again: Death from a Top Hat, a 1938 "impossible crime" novel, featuring Clayton Rawson's primary puzzle-solver, The Great Merlini. Here's what I said about it in my audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast several years ago - updated with the latest information about the book's availability:
- 0 -
Look closely at any mystery which has a so-called “impossible crime” at its heart…a murder inside a locked room, for example…and you will almost certainly come up against what is essentially a stage magic trick: someone, usually the murderer – and, of course, the author – finds a way to manipulate what you see in order to create an illusion. This kind of misdirection is a staple of stage magic – in fact, in many ways, it is at the heart of virtually every stage magician’s act. So imagine, if you will, a couple of murders in which not only the victims but most of the suspects, too, are almost all stage magicians. Think it could cause a headache? We’ll find out as we examine Death from a Top Hat, by Clayton Rawson.
By all rights, Clayton Rawson’s name should be much more familiar than it is to today’s mystery readers. A writer, editor and a first-rate amateur magician, Rawson was one of the four founding authors who created the Mystery Writers of America, the professional organization responsible for the annual Edgar awards. Rawson’s four novels date from the late 1930s and early 1940s and feature, as their primary detective, The Great Merlini, a stage magician who owns and runs a store that provides equipment and tricks to other magicians. In the first Merlini novel, Death From a Top Hat, Merlini is called in to help Inspector Homer Gavigan, of the New York City police department. Gavigan has a problem. A man known as a student of demonology – and, apparently, a pretty good magician – is found murdered in his locked apartment. The keyholes have been blocked up from the inside, the door is bolted, and so forth. The problem, however, goes beyond the locked-room nature of the crime. The problem is that just about everyone who might have had the means, motive and opportunity to murder the victim is, in fact, a stage magician.
Don’t misunderstand me – stage magicians, as such, are hardly a murderous lot. However, as Inspector Gavigan realizes – and the reason why he sends for Merlini to help him – most stage magicians understand very well the art of creating illusions. If anyone knows how to set up a murder so that it looks like an impossible crime…it might very well be a professional magician.
And, in fact, Merlini is able to explain at least a half dozen ways that the murder could have been committed. When a second murder is committed – this time in a place completely isolated by an unbroken coating of newly-fallen snow – the problem is further compounded.
Now readers who have read John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins will remember the famous “locked room lecture” in that novel, which lays out the many different ways that such impossible crimes may be solved. Well, Death from a Top Hat goes beyond Carr’s lecture; in fact, to some degree, the whole book may be thought of as an expanded lecture on how to kill someone inside a locked and guarded room. While no secrets are revealed – the secrets of professional magicians, that is – readers will come away with a heightened appreciation of the TYPE of trickery necessary to deceive audiences – whether at a séance with a false psychic, a professional magic show, or – in this case – a couple of murders.
All of this is handled with a healthy respect for the traditions of fair play, and if the reader is deceived, it is done fairly. There’s a lot of humor here as well. Merlini is extremely likeable…even if he does have the habit – I consider it a bad habit – of doing coin tricks while he speaks, absent-mindedly making coins appear and disappear through sleight of hand.
[The following has been updated as of November, 2019]
Clayton Rawson’s books were out of print for a long time, but – happily – Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series has recently released new editions of Rawson’s novels. If you enjoy being mystified, if you want to figure out how a killer could have escaped through those locked doors and windows, if you want to find out how a murderer got out of a house surrounded by freshly-fallen snow without leaving any footprints…then you will most certainly enjoy Death from a Top Hat.
- 0 -
You can listen to the original review on the Classic Mysteries podcast by clicking here.
Next: The Castleford Conundrum, by J. J. Connington.
Comments