Death from a Top Hat (1938) by Clayton Rawson

I did not intend to do another reread so soon after the recent Agatha Christie triptych of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1916/20), The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and Curtain (c. 1940/75), but lately, there has been a drought of detective fiction with a substantial locked room tangle – which is not to say there has been a dearth of impossible crime reviews. There's never a shortage of those around here. However, the only significant locked room mysteries discussed over the past three months on this blog are Bruce Elliott's You'll Die Laughing (1945), Christianna Brand's Suddenly at His Residence (1946) and Yukito Ayatsuji's Suishakan no satsujin (The Mill House Murders, 1988). So began digging around for a good, old-fashioned locked room mystery that lays it on thick, but currently nothing new or unread resides on the big pile that could make such a guarantee. I turned to a novel with a reputation for reveling in the seemingly miraculous and downright impossible.

Clayton Rawson was an American magician, managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine and mystery novelist whose debut, Death from a Top Hat (1938), left something of a mark on the genre.

Since its publication, Rawson's Death from a Top Hat has enjoyed the status as a classic of its kind and a 1981 panel of seventeen authors, reviewers and experts voted the seventh best locked mystery of all time – beating the likes of Anthony Boucher's Nine Times Nine (1940), Helen McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly (1950) and John Sladek's Invisible Green (1977). But when the next century rolled around, the list of long-time genre classics underwent a slow revision as the internet began to make them easily accessible. Something I commented on in my reviews of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and John Dickson Carr's Till Death Do Us Part (1944). Death from a Top Hat is one of those classics whose status has been challenged in recent times as some have argued its reputation far outstrips the quality of the plot. Let's find out if it can stand up to a reread.

First of all, this is the first I've read Death from a Top Hat in English as the first read was a Dutch translation, De vermoorde magiër (The Murdered Magician). Secondly, Death from a Top Hat is inevitable compared to Carr's The Three Coffins (1935) as it expands on Dr. Gideon Fell's famous Locked Room Lecture and always thought it was a little unfair to measure Rawson's debut against The Three Coffins, but had forgotten those comparisons were invited.

The Three Coffins opened alluding to the impossible murder of Professor Grimaud and the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, which were committed "in such fashion that the murderer must not only have been invisible, but lighter than air." A murderer who can disappear into thin air and pass over freshly-fallen snow without leaving footprints. Death from a Top Hat begins on a similar note stating, "the New York Police Department's official attitude toward the infernal arts of witchcraft and sorcery was damnably inconvenient” when facing "murderer who apparently leaves the scene of his crimes by walking straight through solid walls of brick and plaster and by floating in midair out of second story windows." The Three Coffins is also famous for the brief scene in which Dr. Fell breaks the fourth wall and while Rawson never goes that far here, the first chapter can certainly be read as a piece of meta-fiction.

The story begins with the narrator of the series and freelance reporter, Ross Harte, writing a treatise on the deplorable state of the detective story ("why write a detective story when all the good plots have been used, all the changes rung, all the devices made trite?") in his New York apartment when there's a ruckus next door. In the corridor, there are three people pounding on the door of the apartment across Harte's and a woman's voice saying, "there is death in that room." The apartment belongs to a once top-rated anthropologist, Dr. Cesare Sabbat, who specializes in primitive magic and religions, but "his subject ran away with him" – giving credence to vampires and dabbling "in what he called modern alchemy." When the door is broken open, the group finds the strangled remains of Dr. Sabbat lying on the living room floor, "symmetrically spread-eagled in the exact center of a large star shape that had been drawn on the floor with chalk," tipped at each point with a burning candle. Strange words drawn in chalk, "Come Surgat," surround the pentacle. All the windows are bolted shut and the doors, both of them, were locked, bolted and the keyholes plugged from the inside with pieces of cloth.

By the way, Surgat is the name of a minor demon "who opens all locks" and the book include a neat woodcut reproduction of the fella in question, but is "Surgat roaming around loose, twisting necks and slithering out through keyholes"?

Inspector Homer Gavigan, "one of the department's brighter lights," arrives on the scene to find that practically all his witnesses and potential suspects comprise of a small and vastly growing variety act ("...would only bring along a couple of acrobats and a man who could play Humoresque on the saw, we could go to town with a full evening's show"). However, I'm going to bother with the cast of characters as a not wholly unjustly criticism of Death from a Top Hat today is that it's all plot and no characters. Only real characters here are Ross Harte, Inspector Gavigan and Rawson's series-detective, The Great Merlini, who runs a magic shop (Miracles for Sale) and has helped the police in the past. Harte suggests to Gavigan to bring him in as an outside expert and they go all in on the locked room problem. The banter and discussion of "locked room theory" between those three was a sheer joy to rediscover as Rawson wrote like Death from a Top Hat was going to be his only detective novel. Rawson piled on the cast-iron and gold-plated alibis, false-solutions and additional impossibilities like a tailed suspect vanishing from a taxi. And that only accounts for the first-half of the story.

I don't recall this was ever brought up or pointed out, but, while Rawson aligned Death from a Top Hat with Carr's The Three Coffins, the first-half is unmistakably written in the tradition of S.S. van Dine, Anthony Abbot and early Ellery Queen – missing only a challenge to the reader. Firstly, a good chunk of the first-half takes place in the victim's apartment. A thorough, even exhaustive, investigation to detect and deduce what happened is a staple of the early Van Dinean detective story. Secondly, Merlini is undoubtedly a much more likable character than Philo Vance and young Ellery Queen, but you can see their characters reflected in Merlini during the first-half as he displays his specialized knowledge or when discovering Dr. Sabbat's book collection ("...when you turn a bookworm of my inclinations loose in a pasture like this..."). Lastly, the story is littered with Van Dine-like footnotes providing ancient recipes for the flying ointment or to explain that "a colony of 1000 Lemurians (from the Pacific's even more ancient lost continent of Mu) was reported as late as 1932 to exist on the slopes of Mt. Shasta." They added a little extra to the overall story in addition to two detailed illustrations of locked room crime scenes.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, the body of a second victim is discovered under nearly identical circumstances, "exactly the same position as had the body of Sabbat," which offers an even bigger impossibility. Before the body is found, two witnesses heard a strong and lively argument going on inside the locked room ending with the man who they heard laughing saying, "and the police will never know." When the room is entered, they find everything properly locked and bolted with the exception of an open window with a ladder propped up on the outside. However, the foot of the ladder surrounded by snow "as white and unmarked as a new sheet of paper" and the murderer must have been able to float in midair to have escaped that way. This second impossible murder turns Merlini attention to Dr. Gideon Fell and his famous Locked Room Lecture from The Three Coffins. That "fairly comprehensive classification of the possible methods of committing murder and contriving to have the body found in a sealed room," which is put to good use as Merlini plucks half a dozen false-solutions out of thin air as easily and routinely as making a half dollar coin vanish and reappear. Robert Adey referred to this portion of Death from a Top Hat as "the second-best essay on the methods of effecting a locked-room murder" in Locked Room Murders (1991). Right behind Dr. Fell's Locked Room Lecture. It certainly is an impressive play on the multiple solution ploy from a debuting author.

But does it all hold up in the end? Was the 1981 panel correct in voting it the seventh best locked room mystery up until then or is the criticism from today's somewhat justified? This is going to be a cop out, because I think there's something to be said for both camps.

I half-remembered the locked room-tricks being a bit more involved and complicated, but they were extremely basic with some stage dressing thrown on them. That made them land like a damp squib. After all the building and examining numerous possible explanations to the locked rooms, you would expect something moderately clever that was overlooked or unsuspected combination of the various false-solutions. Even if that, too, turns out to be somewhat basic in nature. But something that looks new or used in a different way. This is like if Carr would have revealed that the mysterious, ever-present judas window he had been making a lot of hay about is nothing more than a hidden knot-hole in the locked door or the wooden frame of the steel-shuttered windows. Not the stuff of classics!

So have to agree with the critics of today that, purely as a locked room mystery, Death from a Top Hat is not the seventh best of its kind, but I can understand how it acquired its classical status – why it endured such a long-lasting popularity among locked room connoisseurs. For the longest time, Death from a Top Hat was the only detective novel offering readers a locked room extravaganza with the everything and the kitchen sink approach. Gaston Leroux's L'homme qui revient de loin (The Man Who Came Back from the Dead, 1912) and Noël Vindry's A travers les murailles (Through the Walls, 1936) were tucked away behind a language barrier. Horatio Winslow and Leslie Quirk's Into Thin Air (1928/29) was as obscure back then as it's today. Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit (1944) was still six years away from being published and John Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966) was not identified as a multiple impossible crime novel until Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019) corrected that oversight. Nowadays, we have become terribly spoiled when it comes to locked room mysteries with multiple, ingeniously-contrived impossible crimes littering the works of James Scott Byrnside, A. Carver, Paul Halter, Jim Noy and the growing list of Japanese translations, but there was a time when Death from a Top Hat was one of those few treats locked room fans could completely loose themselves in. No extraneous, detracting matters like character building or realism. Just throwing out possible solutions how you can get out of sealed rooms.

I was not immune to its charm and thoroughly enjoyed it, even if the ending lacked some much needed ingenuity or simply something clever to punch its ticket as an all-time classic. Death from a Top Hat has now lost some of its shine as others have since come along and played a similar game with better and much more satisfying results. Still an impressive debut warmly recommended to hopeless addicts of locked room and impossible crime fiction like myself.