Clayton Rawson
Clayton Rawson (August 15, 1906, Elyria, Ohio – March 1, 1971, Port Chester, New York) was an American writer of mystery stories as well as a long-time editor and a prominent amateur magician. His four novels featuring a professional magician who calls himself The Great Merlini make use of Rawson's intimate knowledge of stage magic. All four Merlini novels, written in a brief four-year period towards the end of the Golden Age of Mysteries are intricately and ingenuously plotted and feature various kinds of locked room or impossible crimes. Rawson was a friend of both John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, two somewhat more prominent writers of that era who also wrote stories involving seeming impossibilities, sometimes occult, that, in their dénouement have rational explanations. From 1963 to 1970 Rawson was the Managing Editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, the preeminent publication in the field.
Upon the publication of Death from a Top Hat, Rawson's first novel, in 1938, the New York Times wrote: "Murder in a locked room is old stuff but when the victim of the murderer is a student of demonology and other esoteric lore and other characters include... other illusionists, then you have something.... Don't miss this story, and watch for Mr. Rawson's next effort."[1] And the noted critic Anthony Boucher wrote in an introduction to Rawson's second novel:
For fertile imagination, daring inventiveness, delightful posing (and logical solving) of fantastic "impossibilities," they are rivaled only by the best works of John Dickson Carr. (One of the most fascinating evenings of my life was spent in a quiet living room in Larchmont, listening to Rawson, Carr and Queen hold an impromptu seminar of The Locked Room. There spoke Authority.)[2]
An appraisal of Rawson's career in 1980 said, "...he belongs to a fondly remembered period of the past. He was not an important innovator, but rather a clever and quick-witted cultivator of the genre to which he devoted his career.[3]
The Merlini novels
- Death from a Top Hat, Putnam, New York, and Collins, London, 1938
- The Footprints on the Ceiling, Putnam, New York, and Collins, London, 1939
- The Headless Lady, Putnam, New York, and Collins, London, 1940
- No Coffin for the Corpse, Little Brown, Boston, 1942, and Stacey, London, 1972
Merlini short stories
- The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective, Gregg Press, Boston, 1979
References
Sources
Donald A. Yates, writing in *Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, St. Martins Press, New York, 1980, ISBN 0-312-82417-3