Death From a Top Hat by Clayton Rawson

"I want food; then I'm going home where I can think.  I can't do it around you.  Too much going on.  Suspects hpoping in and out like mad, questions and answers popping six dozen to the minute, detectives swarming, Harte writing a book on the back of an envelope, photographers climbing all over me, fingerprint experts spraying powder down my neck, and every ten minutes the whole blame case does a triple somersault over six elephants and lands on it neck.  Once tonight I thought I had it all nicely figured out, and then, suddenly, my solution melted, all at once, like a Vanishing Bird Cage."
--Merlini in Death From a Top Hat by Clayton Rawson (Penzler Publishers, 1938)

Kudos to Otto Penzler for his American Mystery Classics series, bringing back to print neglected American novels.  Like many boys I was fascinated by magic when I was young; it gives the power of knowledge over adults and the pleasure of not revealing how the tricks were done and Rawson's book captures the details of magicians' lives.  Death From a Top Hat is the first in magician Rawson's series about Merlini, a consultant on unexplainable mysteries, often involving locked rooms.  In this book Merlini quotes from Gideon Fell in John Dickson Carr's Three Coffins (1935) on the various kinds of locked room mysteries, divided broadly into those where no murderer was in the room and those where the murderer was in the room but ingeniously escaped.  The two locked-room murders in Death From a Top Hat are especially impressive because they were done by a magician, trained in escapes as well as misdirection.  These murders are complex, involving multiple disguises and intricate distractions.  I'm probably not the ideal reader for this particular genre of mystery, since there are too many suspects, red herrings and changing lists of alibis for me to keep track of, but Death From a Top Hat is a fascinating period piece, giving detailed information -- with a certain sense of humor -- of the world of magic in the thirties, footnotes included.

When I was reading Rawson's book I thought it might make a good movie, with all its fascinating characters, and was surprised to find the movie version, Miracles for Sale, on the internet.  It's a 71-minute B film with Robert Young as Merlini.  It was made at MGM where director Todd Browning had trouble finding work after the compassionate and intelligent Freaks (1932) was hated by the studio, even though his film Dracula (1931) was quite a success. Browning was an actor in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1916 and started making films shortly thereafter, ending his silent film career with the bizarre Unknown (1927) with Lon Chaney, with whom Browning made a number of films, many of them now lost.  Miracles for Sale is an okay B film which follows the broad outlines of Rawson's book, adding Merlini's father as a comic character.  Browning was intrigued by the elements of magic in the film but didn't care much for the comedy and the romance.  It was Browning's final film, after which he lived in seclusion until his death twenty years later.