The Headless Lady (1940) by Clayton Rawson

Clayton Rawson was an American magician, magazine editor and mystery writer who wrote four novels and a dozen short stories starring his most well-known creation, The Great Merlini – a professional magician and amateur detective who first appeared in Death from a Top Hat (1938). The Headless Lady (1940) is the third title in this short-lived series and apparently the book everyone saves for last.

The Headless Lady begins in "that curious commercial establishment in which the Great Merlini carries on his darkly nefarious business of supplying miracles for sale," The Magic Shop, stocking "only the best grade of witchcraft, every item fully guaranteed or your money back." So no surprise when a woman enters the shop asking for the headless lady trick, complete with "visible, circulating blood feature and the respiratory light attachment," but Merlini only has a show model in stock. However, the woman is adamant about wanting the illusion immediately ("I have to have it at once") and is willing to pay cash money to get it. Merlini is positively intrigued by her haste in acquiring the illusion and the false name, Mildred Christine, she gave him ("...tell me why the monogram on your purse is an H rather than a C"). No answers are forthcoming. The mysterious woman manages to get her hands on the headless lady illusion outside the ordinary ordering-and-delivery process, before disappearing.

Nevertheless, Merlini picked up enough clues and hints to make an educated guess where to
find her. Merlini together with his chronicler and freelance journalist, Ross Harte, travel to the Mighty Hannum Combined Shows currently playing in Waterboro, New York. Only to find the circus plagued by trouble, ill-omens and even death.

Major Rutherford Hannum, "an old-time circus man who dates from the wagon-show days," owns and runs the show, but died the previous night outside of Kings Falls when his car hit a bridge abutment ("pretty bad smash"), which immediately arouses suspicion as the Major was a notoriously slow driver – "no one ever saw him go faster than forty-five on a straight stretch." More evidence comes to light pointing towards a staged roadside accident as the strange incidents, and accidents, start to pile on. Pauline Hannum is the daughter of the late owner and wire-walker who makes a nasty fall when the lights fail, but was it merely an accident or attempted murder? And who, or what, left the bizarre, whorlless fingerprints on a trailer window? Who took the evidence Merlini had gathered and who is the mysterious, reclusive woman playing the headless lady?

Ross Harte astutely observes, "murder on a circus, as I'm beginning to realize, is as easy as breathing and damned hard to prove," because, "instead of a nice tight little matter of half a dozen suspects cooped up in an isolated mansion out at the end of nowhere," they "got a hundred or more all in the open and moving rapidly across-country" ("clues, if any, scattered halfway across the state"). A problem that gets even worse when nearly everyone has solid-gold alibis and potential shenanigans with identities have to be taken into consideration. It takes a while, but eventually The Headless Lady produces a dead, headless and very likely murdered lady. Merlini immediately becomes the number one suspect in the eyes of the local police.

Clayton Rawson is remembered today as a writer of locked room mysteries, a reputation largely due to his impossible crime extravaganza Death from a Top Hat and a handful of short stories, but The Headless Lady stands closer to Christopher Bush and Brian Flynn than to John Dickson Carr and Hake Talbot. First of all, The Headless Lady is not a locked room mystery. It's sometimes mistakenly identified as one on account of the jail house scene in the second half. Merlini and Ross Harte are thrown in a brand new, up-to-date cell block with an electrical control box operating "an additional bolt on all the cells simultaneously, double locking them" ("a ghost couldn't get outta here unless I let him"). What follows is a fun vignette along the lines of Jacques Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13" (1905) in which they try to escape from their cells and cell block. A fun little escape story-within-a-story, but not really a locked room mystery.

Like I said, The Headless Lady is much more reminiscent of Bush or Flynn with its caravan of alibis, potentially dodgy identities and a woman of mystery. While the story can feel fragmented without a main hook or even really a central murder, Rawson wrote an engrossing, tremendously enjoyable whodunit loaded with background information and footnotes on circus life, carnival slang and some colorful characters. My favorite footnote gives a translation to an anecdote entirely told in slang beginning with the sentence, "I was tossing broads on the backstretch at Saratoga." Add to this an earnest attempt to hide the murderer in plain sight and trying to plant clues in the direction of this person, the result is one of the most striking circus mysteries from this period. And a low-key good, solid Golden Age detective novel! I'm glad I saved this one for last. I liked it.

More importantly, the absence of a locked room murder or other type of impossible crime in The Headless Lady proved to be eye-opening. It made me realize Rawson's most important contribution to the detective story are not his bag of locked room-tricks, but simply the creation of the Great Merlini. One of the first and still the best magician detective the genre has produced. I can see now why writers like Tom Mead and Gigi Pandian cite this series as a favorite and major source of inspiration. So you can probably expect a review of The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) before too long.