Clayton Rawson’s Merlini mysteries

Death from a Top Hat is the first novel featuring Clayton Rawson’s magician character The Great Merlini, which was first published in 1938. An occultist is murdered in a locked room, leaving the characters to wonder if there’s a supernatural explanation, but illusionist Merlini provides a thoroughly satisfying rational resolution. Rawson was a friend of better-known locked-room mystery novelist John Dickson Carr, and although Carr occasionally wrote magicians into his fiction, it was Rawson who created two recurring magician characters, Merlini and Don Diavolo.

Though it’s unsurprising to find magicians solving impossible crimes in the mysteries of the Golden Age of detective fiction from nearly a century ago, there’s a resurgence of this type of mystery today, and not just in traditional mysteries. Some of the best thriller authors writing today have incorporated magicians solving seemingly impossible crimes into their books.

The first Jessica Blackwood thriller, Angel Killer, is filled with ingenious impossible crimes, and this type of baffling mystery continues throughout the terrific series. In Angel Killer, a young woman is found dead in a cemetery, looking as if she tried to crawl out of her own grave that’s buried deep in the earth. Not only that, but she’s only been dead a few hours, yet she originally died and was buried many years ago. The impossibilities continue as more dead bodies appear. Magician-turned-FBI-agent Jessica Blackwood must use her knowledge from her childhood growing up in a family of magicians to see through the misdirection of “the Warlock” to prove to the public that he can’t truly perform miracles. Mayne is a performing magician from a family of FBI agents, so his knowledge of both professions comes through on the page.

The Vanished Man is another thriller to feature magicians and impossible crimes. In the fifth Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs thriller, there’s not only a magician helping solve the crimes, but an illusionist (“the conjurer”) appears to be committing the crimes. The book opens with an impossible crime, as a killer vanishes from a locked classroom at a music school where a murder has taken place. That’s only the beginning of a series of baffling escapes.

Coming full circle back to the Golden Age of detective fiction, many present-day writers choose to set their locked-room mysteries in the past. Prolific short story writer Tom Mead has written about magician Joseph Spector in his short fiction (including “The Indian Rope Trick” published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine), and now the magician gets a full-length novel. Mead’s debut novel, Death and the Conjuror, comes out later this year, and I can’t wait to read it. Set in the 1930s, the mystery revolves around a celebrity psychiatrist who’s found dead in a locked room, with no way the killer could have escaped.

After a disastrous accident derails Tempest Raj’s career, and life, she heads back to her childhood home in California to comfort herself with her grandfather’s Indian home-cooked meals. Though she resists, every day brings her closer to the inevitable: working for her father’s company. Secret Staircase Construction specializes in bringing the magic of childhood to all by transforming clients’ homes with sliding bookcases, intricate locks, backyard treehouses, and hidden reading nooks.
When Tempest visits her dad’s latest renovation project, her former stage double is discovered dead inside a wall that’s supposedly been sealed for more than a century. Fearing she was the intended victim, it’s up to Tempest to solve this seemingly impossible crime. But as she delves further into the mystery, Tempest can’t help but wonder if the Raj family curse that’s plagued her family for generations—something she used to swear didn’t exist—has finally come for her.