The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) by Clayton Rawson

Recently, I reviewed the last of the unread Great Merlini mysteries that resided on the big pile, namely The Headless Lady (1940), which proved to be surprising in just how radically different it's from Clayton Rawson's better-known Death from a Top Hat (1938) and "From Another World" (1948) – two classics which gave him the reputation of a locked room artisan. The Headless Lady dispenses with the locked room murders and impossible disappearances in favor of cast-iron alibis, dodgy identifies and an escalations staged around a three-ring circus. In spirit, The Headless Lady stands closer to the works of Christopher Bush and Brian Flynn than John Dickson Carr or Hake Talbot.

The Headless Lady left me with two thoughts. I already mentioned in that review it left me with the idea that Rawson's biggest contribution was not his bag of locked room-tricks, but creating the archetype of the magician detective in the Great Merlini. What I didn't bring up is how the plot almost suggested, or revealed, Rawson's background and ethics as a magician hamstrung his abilities to deliver satisfying solutions for his locked room scenarios. Reluctant to give away trade secrets. Rawson appeared to be more comfortable handling a non-impossible crime story, toying around with alibis and identities, than a grand-scale, Carr-like locked room mystery. Such as the impossible crime extravaganza Death from a Top Hat or the atrociously bad No Coffin for the Corpse (1942).

So decided to take another look at the second novel in the Great Merlini series, The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939), to test that fan theory hypothesis. I read The Footprints on the Ceiling ages ago in an old, dated Dutch translation (De voetstappen op het plafond) and remember practically nothing of the overall story or plot – except for the upside down footprints and some other (minor) impossibilities. Hey, subverting your expectations is not my job.

First of all, The Footprints on the Ceiling is a tightly packed, complicatedly-plotted mystery piling incident, on incident, right up till the end. I'm going to gloss over a lot of details as encapsulating everything that goes on is next to impossible.

The story begins with Ross Harte reading a curious notice in the newspaper, "WANTED TO RENT: Haunted House, preferably in rundown condition. Must be adequately supplied with interesting ghost," which leads him to the Magic Shop. And from there the story quickly begins to resemble a story of old-world adventure and harum-scarum. The shop assistant, Burt, tells him Merlini is away at the moment, but the magician detective has been looking for him and investigating the spooky history of Skelton Island, which is a small island in the East River – "a stone's throw from Manhattan." Skelton Island has a "positively lurid" history of piracy, sunken treasure and a haunting. In 1850, Captain Arnold Skelton, "an eccentric, fiery-tempered old boy," appeared out of nowhere to settle down in New York. Rumors at the time opined the old sea-devil bought Skelton Island and built his house with pirate loot. The Skeltons were never able to shake-off their pirate legacy, but instead became rather proud of it over the generations ("adds an interesting spot of color to the ancestral tree"). There are still three Skeltons living on the island, Linda together with her two half-brothers, Arnold and Floyd, which has become a hotspot for spiritualism, treasure hunters and other criminal activities. However, the spiritual star attraction is not the noisy ghost of Captain Skelton, but Colonel Watrous' prize medium, Madam Rappourt, who both previously appeared in Death from a Top Hat.

Colonel Watrous is a psychic researcher of two decades and believed Madam Rappourt to be genuine article. And wrote extensively on her in his latest book Modern Mediums. Going as far as saying that "psychical research can rest its whole case on her phenomena," but doubt has began to set in ("she's up to something even stranger than usual") and wants an outside opinion. So turned to the Great Merlini to sound out the medium. Linda Skelton happened to be greatly interested in psychic matters and asked the Colonel to bring along Madam Rappourt when requesting permission to investigate the deserted, reputedly haunted house on the island. A séance is being planned that gives Merlini the opportunity he needs. Ross Harte is instructed to go the island with his camera "loaded with infra-red film" and a loaded .32 automatic.

Now all of that sounds conventional enough for a Golden Age novel. A mystery novel covering everything from a fraudulent medium, séance shenanigans and an isolated island to the figure of the Great Detective trying to disentangle a tangle of Grade-A alibis, seemingly inexplicable occurrences and a very subtle murderer. This is, however, only the introduction to the environs of the story and some of the colorful characters dwelling there. When the plot kicks off, it gives the strong impression Rawson patterned The Footprints on the Ceiling after Carter Dickson's The Unicorn Murders (1935) and The Punch and Judy Murders (1936). Before he can even get to the island, Ross Harte's suitcase gets switched for one crammed with "funny-looking old coins, worn and wobbly about the edges" and inscribed "GEORGIUS III—DEL GRATIA" – dated 1779. But loses this treasure as soon as he gained it when he gets blackjacked from behind. Everything begins to rapidly accelerate once they land on Skelton Island.

Merlini, Harte and the Colonel go to the haunted house to inspect it when they hear footsteps upstairs, but the only one they find upstairs is Linda Skelton. She has been dead for hours from cyanide poison. So what happened to person they heard walking upstairs and where did the intruder disappeared to as the only way out is a forty feet drop to the dark river below? A sudden fire breaks out in the cellar. The phone line is cut and someone scuttled all the boats, which marooned them on the island. Not to mention the curious footprints on the ceiling of the crime scene, "one uncanny, inexplicable footprint after another," stopping "directly above the open window and the sheer 40-foot drop outside" ("an upside-down procession of surrealist impossibilities"). Believe it or not, this is still only a small sample of everything Rawson throws in the direction of his characters and readers. A naked, unidentified body of a man is discovered in a locked hotel room who died of the bends and shootout happens towards the end with one of the bullets magically changing direction mid-air.

So, on paper, The Footprints on the Ceiling is as much an impossible crime extravaganza as Death from a Top Hat, but with key differences. One, the impossibilities are not overplayed and treated like the small puzzle pieces of a bigger, overall picture. That helped to manage expectations. And, two, none of the tricks really hinge on any type of magic-tricks or techniques. Rawson constructed the plot entirely around the gentle art of misdirection and the principles of deception ("...nothing more than psychology turned upside down and inside out"). Without the risk of breaking the magician's code, Rawson put those minor impossibilities to better use than those from Death from a Top Hat and the footprints-trick even allowed for a flicker of inspired clueing you normally find only in an Agatha Christie or Christianna Brand story (SPOILER/ROT13: jura bar bs gur punenpgref bofreirf nobhg gur sbbgcevagf, “fher, gur thl gung znqr ’rz vf gjryir srrg gnyy naq pna jnyx ba uvf unaqf”). Like I said, the impossibilities here are only pieces of a larger, incredibly jumbled puzzle that, perhaps, has too much going on with too many independently moving parts. It's easy to lose track of all that's going on on the island and to pull the plot-threads together in the end without dropping one, or two, would have been impressive feat. But to do with a solution almost bordering on the believable is the work of master. Not a second-stringer. So either that old, crummy Dutch translation was rubbish or my taste had not yet matured or been fine-tuned enough to appreciate this gem.

On top of all of that, Rawson peppered the story with fascinating tidbits of the arcane and macabre. The dead man in the hotel room who died of the bends provides an opportunity to discuss "compressed air as a murder device," how it can be done, impracticable as it may be, as well as pointing out its horrific effects – "it carbonates the blood, literally turns the victim into a human soda-water bottle." What about the reverse, death by implosion, which could happen to the hardhat divers of the past. If the surface pump would let the air pressure go, the tons of water pressure would squeeze a diver right up into his helmet and taken out with a spoon ("divers have facetiously referred to the results of a squeeze as 'strawberry jam'"). Another chapter delves into the subject of poisons and makes an inventory of all the available poisons on the island with final tally coming to thirty ("this case is getting to be a toxicologist's nightmare"), which makes the island something of a poisoner's paradise. And a fascinating sidetrack in the forgotten history of the so-called Blue Men. In earlier days, doctors prescribed silver nitrate for stomach ulcers or silver salts for epilepsy, but they turned their patients skin permanently blue. Some were condemned to earn their living as freak show attractions ("billed as The Great What-Is-It From Mars").

It all makes for a rich storytelling adding to a crazy, but surprisingly lucidly-plotted detective story. Something that had no right to work or even be successful, but, somehow, someway, Rawson pulled it off with flying colors. The Footprints on the Ceiling might very well be the best trick Rawson ever played on his readers and is the detective novel he should be remembered for today (together with The Headless Lady). Highly recommended!

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.

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.

There's No Such Thing as Magic

"The impossible situation, by its very uniqueness, ultimately limits the possibilities."

- The Great Merlini (Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat, 1938)

Clayton Rawson was an illusionist, editor and mystery writer, who's mostly remembered for his detective stories about The Great Merlini, but he also authored a second, short-lived series about another magician detective, Don Diavolo – originally published, as by "Stuart Towne," in Red Star Mystery during the early 1940s. All of the stories were collected in two volumes, Death Out of Thin Air (1941) and Death from Nowhere (1943), which comprises of four novellas.

A fifth novella, entitled "Murder from the Grave," was scheduled for the February, 1941 issue of Red Star Mystery, but was never published. Considering the title of the story, I strongly suspect Rawson refurbished it as a Merlini novel and released it a year later as No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). And that brings us to the subject of today's review.

Last month, "JJ," who blogs at The Invisible Event, reviewed No Coffin for the Corpse and the Don Diavolo novellas were brought up in the tail of comments.

I opined that the Great Merlini series was written as proper, straightforward detective stories, while the Don Diavolo ones were pure pulp, however, my observation about the latter was based on just one story, "Death Out of Thin Air" - which I read in the elephantine The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014) and reviewed here. So I wanted to see how correct, or incorrect, my assumption was and picked one of the two volumes from the big pile.

Death from Nowhere opens with a novella that's part detective story and part pulp thriller, but both sections of the plot establishes Don Diavolo, the Scarlet Wizard, as a master escapist.

The first story, "Claws of Satan," was first published in the June, 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery and begin with Don Diavolo, bound and manacled, inside a submerged "double cocoon of glass and metal." It's an escape trick that tied him to his basement workshop for the past week, but an unpleasant business affair forces him to venture outside. A disreputable circus owner, R.J. Hagenbaugh, bought a new guillotine trick from Diavolo's outfit, but stopped payment on the check he wrote him. Now the fear is that he'll take apart the illusion and put up for sale in the catalog of his Outdoor Amusement Supply House. And the Scarlet Wizard won't see a dime of it!

So, of course, Diavolo did not leave his workshop to have a respectful disagreement with Hagenbough, "mentally trying to compose a few sentences whose edges would be sharp enough to penetrate" Hagenbaugh's thick hide, but the magician would be engaged in trouble once he mendaciously gained access to his private office – getting knocked from behind by an unknown occupant of the room. Once he regained consciousness, Hagenbaugh is slumped behind his desk, dead as a door nail, with "five long parallel scratches" along the right side of his face and neck. A chair was tipped back against the door, top jammed beneath the doorknob, while his arch nemesis, Inspector Church, was banging against it! Diavolo had some explaining to do.

Interestingly, the first half of this novella reads like a proper detective story in the Van Dine-Queen mold: the crime-scene is thoroughly investigated, which yields such clues as a missing shoelace, a damp sponge and water on the floor, but also the discovery of another crime and several revelations. Additionally, there are some false solutions. However, the best part is perhaps how this section of the story ended. Diavolo is arrested, handcuffed to both Inspector Church and Lieutenant Brophy, but he still manages to vanish... from a locked and watched elevator!

The second half of the story is more carny pulp and has a deadly tight rope act as well as Diavolo tangling with some circus folk. Of course, this will land him in another spot of danger that requires him to pull off another escape act. Seriously, this series show what Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin series would've been like had the character been a detective instead of a gentleman thief.

Luckily, the solution is satisfying enough and properly clued. I loved the clue of the cryptic message, "SNOW LEOPARD," and how that tied in to the motive, but locked room angle is also properly handled with sober explanation. The trick of the barricaded door is fairly routine, but not all that bad. It's very believable. Not as good is how the murderer remained unseen from the secretary outside of the office. It's not something everyone will swallow and basically ripped off from a famous, but disputed, short story that some even seem to hate. As a whole, the story is not bad and really like it. Especially the first half.

The second novella, "The Enchanted Dagger," came from the December, 1940 issue of Red Star Mystery and is, for better and for worse, sensationalist pulp from start to finish – topped with some Fu Manchu-style shenanigans.

Diavolo is challenged by a crusty, old champion of the paranormal, Mr. Nicholas Sayre, who has "a deep-seated distaste for magicians." Sayre is a multi-millionaire fascinated by "the subject of Tibetan and Indian sorcery" and is a fierce proponent of the supernormal, but Diavolo once proved that the president of psychic research society was a fraud. And that why he particularly disapproves of the Scarlet Wizard.

However, Sayre has come across a man who can do everything: a mystic by the name of Shivara. He can vanish front of your very eyes, summon an astral projection of himself and read minds. So, the millionaire wants to pit the powers of the mystic against the skeptical-minded Diavolo, which results in a stunning array of seemingly impossible situations – such as a poker moving by its own, a disappearance from a library and a murder by the titular dagger. A dagger that was thrust between someone's shoulder-blades!

This plot-thread closely linked to the disappearance of a body from a hotel room, an archaeologist who supposedly died in Persia (present-day Iran) and the long-lost treasure of Alexander the Great. I found this to be one of the more appealing plot-threads of the novella, because the impossible crimes and supernatural feats had a profoundly disappointing explanation. You can even say it was a bit of a cheat.

The answer as to how a poker and dagger could be moved by invisible hands, the disappearance from locked and watched library and the astral projection all had the same, disappointing answer. One that rolled two of the most underwhelming and unfair explanations into one. Diavolo even used it to do the Indian Rope trick. I know, it sounds intriguing, but believe me, it's not. We give the Master of the Locked Room himself, the Great John Dickson Carr, flack for his dagger trick and cheating in Seeing is Believing (1941), but that's actually ingenious compared to this.

So, all in all, I would say that my observation about the differences between Rawson's Merlini and Diavolo stories was pretty spot on. The former are written as proper detective stories and the latter are firmly grounded in pulp territory, which the second half of the first story and the entire second story clearly shows. However, they make for a good read and the sheer imagination of all those impossible situations, false solutions and dangerous escapes make them very energetic tales. Even if their ending doesn't always live up their wonderful premise.

Well, that's two more locked room mysteries I can scratch off the big list.

Magician's Bouquet

"The whole point and headache is this. Every microscopic opening in that room – the tiny little crack under the door, the keyhole, the joins of the two windows where the sashes meet – every place is sealed up as tight as a drum-head by glued paper fastened on the inside."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (Carter Dickson's He Wouldn't Kill Patience, 1944)

Clayton Rawson was an illusionist, mystery writer and editor who worked in editorial positions for various magazines, such as True Detective and Master Detective, which include having served as the Managing Editor for the famous Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but he's primarily remembered as one of the Golden Era's foremost practitioners of the locked room conundrum – which were hatched by drawing on his extensive knowledge of magic, illusions and stage-effects. He even employed stage-magicians as the detective characters for both of his series: namely The Great Merlini and Don Diavolo.

One of the detective story’s greatest champion, Frederic Dannay, better known as one half of "Ellery Queen," described Rawson as "one of the topflight mystifiers in the whole bloodhound business." It's an opinion that was shared by John Dickson Carr, undisputed master of the locked room mystery, who was a friend of Rawson and on several occasions they concocted a challenge for each other – resulting in some excellent and even classic examples of the impossible crime story.

Two of those stories were collected in The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective (1979), which gathered all of the short stories and short-shorts about his most well-known and best-remembered creations. You guessed it: this flimsy introduction serves as a rickety bridge to my review of that very collection.

There are a dozen tales in this collection and the first three were originally published as reader-contest stories in EQMM, which reportedly flooded their offices with "an overwhelming response that many more prizes were awarded than the original number offered." I found them to be fairly clever for a bunch of short-shorts and comparable in nature to the nuggets of challenging crime-fiction found in Ellery Queen's Minute Mysteries and H.A. Ripley's How Good a Detective Are You? (1934).

In the first story, "The Clue of the Tattooed Man," there's an apparent impossibility clinging to the strangling death of a snake-charmer, Zelda, who was found in a hotel room on the eight floor with the only window "locked on the inside." A game of craps was being played by a group of circus performer in the corridor and they observed the only door providing an entrance or exit to the crime-scene. It was an all right story for something that short.

Interestingly to note: this short-short was not jotted down by Robert Adey in Locked Room Murders (1991).

The next one, "The Clue of the Broken Legs," concerns the shooting of a theatrical producer, Jorge Lasko, who was bound to a wheelchair with two broken legs, but his murderer "vanished into thin air like a soap bubble" from a locked and guarded room. Not exactly a classic of the form and the explanation to the impossible murder is a slight variation on an old trick, but nice enough for a short-short.

I thought the plot of the third story, "The Clue of the Missing Motive," had the potential for a longer story, which deals with a gunman who took "potshots at an unidentified man in New York City’s Washington Square Park" with fatal consequences. The shots came from the direction of a house where everyone had a motive to kill one another, but they all lacked a proper motive for the murder of the man who actually got felled by a bullet.

The first actual short story from this collection, "From Another World," was the result of a sporting challenge between Rawson and Carr, in which they tried to best each other by trying to come up with the cleverest possible explanation for a locked and airtight room – the "sealed room to end all sealed rooms." Rawson opened his story in Merlini's magic supply store, "undoubtedly one of the world's strangest rooms," where the magician-detective receives a visit from his friend and narrator, Ross Harte.

Harte is also a reporter and is researching an article about extrasensory perception (ESP), psycho-kinesis (PK) and clairvoyance, which is why he stopped by Merlini on his way to the home of a millionaire. Andrew Drake has grown obsessed with psychic phenomena and wants to sink several of his millions in researching the potential power of the human mind, but wants to convince himself by setting up a séance with a medium, Rosa Rhys – who is described as one of "the greatest apport medium" currently operating in the United States.

However, when Harte arrives at the home of the millionaire, he has to break down the door to the room where the séance was being conducted and what was found inside that room was bizarre: the bloodied remains of Drake, an unconscious, skimpily-clad Rosa and every crack or opening was covered with gummed paper. The room was literally sealed shut from the inside! Rawson constructed a splendid and original trick to explain the sealed room, which had a clever piece of misdirection that even managed to stump Merlini for a brief moment. On top of that, the sealed room trick was tagged to an equally motive and a very convincing murderer – which made for a genuine classic locked room story and short detective-fiction.

You can find Carr's explanation in the book that provided an opening quote to this blog-post.

I originally read the next story, "Off the Face of the Earth," in Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories (1987), which mentioned in the introduction how Carr posed the premise of the story as a challenge to his friend: a man walks into a telephone booth and vanishes – followed by "work that one out." Once again, the magician and mystery writer rose to meet the challenge.

Inspector Homer Gavigan drops by Merlini with a rather peculiar problem: a chorus girl, Helen Hope, has gone missing and a very strange individual accurately predicted her disappearance. Bela Zyyzk claims to be "a momentary visitor to this planet" and is "a mindreader to boot," but Gavigan is the eternal skeptic and drags the self-proclaimed alien in front of a judge – which is when he makes another prediction how "the Outer Darkness is going to swallow Judge Keeler" as well. That's a problem for Gavigan. Judge Keeler is as crooked as a politician with scoliosis and has been pocketing fix money from the local mobsters, but they are in the process of closing a tight net around the Keeler.

So the last thing Gavigan wants is for the judge to disappear from the face of the earth and sticks a tail on him. The policeman charged with following him around never let him out of their sight for even a second, but there was a moment when the judge slipped into a phone booth. A phone booth of which "the back wall is sheet metal backed by solid marble" and lacked any "sliding panels, hinged panels, removable sections" or "trapdoors," which made a secret and unseen escape all but impossible – which is nonetheless what Judge Keeler managed to pull off. He entered a phone booth with only a single entrance and exit, watched by the police, proceeded to vanish from it. Leaving only his smashed, horn-rimmed glasses behind and a dangling phone receiver from which a voice was heard saying, "this is the end of the trail, Lieutenant."

Overall, the story does not soar to the same heights as the previous one, but it's still excellent and loved how Merlini improved on the trick for his demonstration.

For the next story, "Merlini and the Lie Detector," we return to the second batch of short-shorts that were used to challenge the readers of EQMM, but the murder of a TV producer proved to be unmemorable and not particular fair to the reader. I honestly did not care for this one.

However, I did enjoy "Merlini and the Vanished Diamonds," which is of special interest to fans of Ellery Queen and his detective stories about extensive searches of persons and rooms for vanished objects.

In this particular short-short, Merlini provides assistance to Inspector Gavigan and the Customs Service by helping to find a stash of "top quality blue-white stones." The person suspected of having hid the stones is a known crook and cardsharp, Pierre Aldo, but they have done a complete search of his person and cabin – without any result. Luckily, Merlini has a pretty good hunch where the diamonds may have been hidden. A fair story on the surface, but the experienced Customs officer, who rattled a whole slew of examples of diamond smuggling, probably should have checked that place, but, regardless, I still liked it. But I like these kinds of stories. My favorite is probably Ellery Queen's "Diamonds in Paradise," which is a cute short-short collected in Queens Full (1965). There's also Arthur Porges' "The Scientist and the Invisible Safe," from The Curious Cases of Cyriack Skinner Grey (2009), and "The Problem of the Missing Necklace" by Jacques Futrelle, which I recently reviewed in my takedown of several of his locked room mysteries.

The last of these short-shorts, "Merlini and the Sound Effects Murder," deals with the shooting of a sound effects specialist and the sound of his murder has been recorded, but Merlini solved the murder by noticing something that was not on the recording. A simple and somewhat disappointing story.

The next story, "Nothing is Impossible," tackles a subject not often dealt with in this genre of ours: ufology. Albert North is an aviation pioneer who has become interested in the study of extra-terrestrial visitors and has become "an unofficial clearing house for saucer information," but the circumstances of his strange death seems to indicate the aliens found him too inquisitive. North is found dead in his locked office and the only other person present in the room, his son-in-law, was unconscious and completely naked – his clothes "appear to have passed through his body."

However, the impossibility is not the locked office door, but how the murder weapon is nowhere to be found and the presence of strange footprints of two-foot, three-toed alien on the dusty surface of the file cabinet. Not a mind-blowing classic of the locked room sub-genre, but interestingly enough for its ufology background X-Files vibe.

The next story has a great title, "Miracles – All in the Day's Work," in which Inspector Gavigan was looking forward to his first vacation in over three years, but dropped by a fishing friend on his way to the Maine woods and became a witness to his seemingly impossible murder – because his murderer vanished from a watched room on the top floor of a New York skyscraper. A fun and interesting enough, but fails to pose a true challenge to the reader. You should be able to identify the murderer and gauge the main idea behind the locked room trick.

I found the next story, "Merlini and the Photographic Clue," not to be very memorable, which revolved around the murder of a gossip columnist and a photograph that showed a person could be at two places at the same time. 

Clayton Rawson shows-off "The Headless Lady."

The final story from this collection, "The World's Smallest Locked Room," begins with a sincere apology from Ross Harte for having been "so remiss in keeping you up to date on The Great Merlini," which is followed by an update on his life and how his magic shop has become "the largest emporium of magicians’ supplies in the world" – even receiving orders "written in Swahili" from "witch doctors in the Congo." The impossible problem is an attempted poisoning at a place called Pancakes Unlimited, but the plot is fairly minor and I found the snippets of background information, characters and historical references far more interesting. There's a private-investigator, named Hammett Wilde, who's "no relation to either Dashiell or Oscar," and there was a reference to the moon landing to show some time has passed since the earlier stories, which is probably why the victim was given the name of Hassleblad.

So, all in all, a fair collection of short-shorts and short stories, but I had already read the best ones in the various, well-known locked room anthologies. However, I did not mind reacquainting myself with those excellent impossible crime stories. More importantly, this volume has whetted my appetite for the Don Diavolo novellas and The Headless Lady (1940), which is the last unread Merlini novel residing on the big pile. So you can probably expect more Rawson in the not so distant future.  

Nothing is Impossible!

"The human mind; what a magnificent mechanism! Properly applied it creates miracles. Nothing, basically, is impossible..."

- Brooke (The Newtonian Egg).

Open any anthology of detective stories, published in the pass thirty years, and chances are that most of them contain one or more stories penned by the unequalled Edward D. Hoch – one of the last giants of the genre until he passed away in 2008. He wrote over 900 (!!!) short stories and appeared in every issue of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine from May 1973 until several months after his death. That's an unbroken streak of publications lasting nearly four decades! But his real legacy will be that of the modern master of the impossible crime story.

He was probably more prolific than John Dickson Carr himself, the acknowledged master of all things impossible, and was just as original as Joseph Commings when it came to finding new ways to dispatch people to the great hereafter that completely flies in the face of reality.

Hoch put his prodigious mind and diabolic creativity to use to create such baffling situations as a man jumping from a skyscraper on the top-floor, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground several hours later; fresh corpses turning up in recently unearthed coffins and time capsules; an old haunted oak tree with branches that strangles everyone going near it; a man sitting alone in his car is murdered while stuck in a traffic jam and a shower that miraculously starts spitting daggers are only a few examples.

In All But Impossible! (1981), however, he gives the stage to his fellow composers in crime and allows them to show what tricks are hidden up their sleeves. Unfortunately, this collection turned out to be the usual mixed bag of treats and subsequently touches on all the weak and strong points of a short story collection. There are a handful of stories that you'll absolutely love, some will make you want to chuck the darn book across the room, a couple you've probably seen one time too many in other collections and a few of them have no business being there.

But enough of this palaver, let's take them down from the top:

The Shadow of the Goat by John Dickson Carr

This is one of the first impossible crime stories that John Dickson Carr put to paper, for his school news sheet during his undergraduate days, and introduces the first of his recurring detectives: M. Henri Bencolin. He's a cunning prefect of the Parisian police whose coal black eyes, pointed beard and hair parted in the middle and turned up like horns gives him a Mephistophelean appearance – and his menacing ambience strikes fear in the heart of many. However, he has not yet morphed into the theatrical devil of the novels here and merely provides the answer as to how a man could've vanished from a watched room, commit a murder, and disappear a second time during a disturbed attempt at a second murder. The story has all the familiar elements of later day Carr, but misses its refinement. 

There are more of John Dickson Carr's earlier forays into the mystery genre collected in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) – a posthumous compilation showing him grow as a writer from infancy to adulthood. Highly recommended!

The Little House at Croix-Rousse by Georges Simenon (translated by Anthony Boucher)

The literary father of Inspector Maigret wasn't really known for honoring the traditional detective story, but one of his first tales was a full-fledged locked room mystery – in which a man is shot in an empty house surrounded by an observant battalion of policemen. The solution, easily deduced, anticipates John Dickson Carr by nearly a decade, but the whodunit angle leaves its reader with an unnecessary sense of disappointment.

The Problem of the Emperor's Mushrooms by James Yaffe

Paul Dawn, the only member of the Homicide Squad's Department of Impossible Crimes, listens to Professor Bottle's historical account of the murder of the Roman Emperor Claudius – and the impossible angle to his demise. A poison was administered in his favorite dish of mushrooms that didn't affect the Emperor's food-taster, but threw him in a violent convulsion. I reveled at the double layered structure of the story, that runs for only 14 pages, and James Yaffe, who was only sixteen at the time he wrote it, should be commended for it. A thoroughly enjoyable and sagacious story! 

Douglas Greene had the following to say about this series when I asked if the stories were ever collected in a book: "Emperor's Mushrooms is far and away the best of the lot" and "the others have their moments but I don't think the series as a whole is worthy of being bookformed."  

Still, I wish stories like those from the Department of Impossible Crimes were more easily available for sampling to us that represent the next generation of enthusiastic mystery addicts.

From Another World by Clayton Rawson

This story was the result of a sporting challenge between Clayton Rawson and John Dickson Carr, in which they competed against one another to see who could come up with the best possible solution to the following premise: a murder has taken place in a room that's not only locked from the inside, but also completely sealed shut with tape! It's one of Rawson's finest tales and I think it won him this little wager with the grandmaster himself.

You can find John Dickson Carr's answer to this challenge in He Wouldn't Kill Patience (1944) – published under the byline Carter Dickson.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

A carefully crafted persecution story, in which a young woman lost two great teaching jobs because students and staff were frightened by her ghost-like doppelganger haunting the school grounds. It's an innovative approach to the impossible problem, but like vanishing houses and trains the possible solutions are limited – and every observant reader will stumble to the identity of the perpetrator and motive before the end of the story. However, you can't help but take pleasure in how expertly all the plot threads are tightly woven together. Helen McCloy was an excellent plotter!

This story was extended into a full-length novel and published under the same title in 1950. 

Snowball in July by Ellery Queen

As far as I can tell, finding a logical and rational explanation as to how an entire train, including its cargo of passengers, could've evaporated in between two train stations hasn't been attempted since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle broached the idea in his 1898 short story, "The Lost Special." The solution in this story isn't as spectacular as the one in Doyle's story, but it's one of the few, if not the only, alternative solution to this problem – and it's a workable one at that! 

The Newtonian Egg by Peter Godfrey

The smallest of all locked room mysteries, in which a terminal ill man lectures from his hospital bed on Jacques Futrelle and John Dickson Carr – eats a spoonful of egg, after cracking its perfectly sealed shell, and almost immediately succumbs of cyanide poisoning. So how could poison be introduced in a sealed egg without penetrating its exterior? The answer isn't half as clever as you might expect from such a tantalizing premise and left me a little bit disappointed. The problem required a grander solution.

The Triple-Lock'd Room by Lillian de la Torre

Dr. Sam Johnson and James Boswell try to protect a woman who has confined her concerns regarding the safety of her jewels to them and fix her door with a triple lock, but that didn't stop this apparently invisible prowler from slipping into the room and stabbing her to death. The idea and characters were promising, but the solution De la Torre flings at her readers is one that should've only been uttered by a very dense Hastings-type of character, before being laughed out of the room, or at best proposed as a tongue-in-cheek false solution.

The Brazen Locked Room by Isaac Asimov

This is one of those gimcrack stories that makes you scratch your head in utter amazement at what the anthologist was thinking in adding it to the lineup. It's a pure fantasy tale, in which a miserable man makes a pact with a demon for 10 years of happiness in exchange of becoming a demon himself, and as a final test he has to escape from a solid bronze room – using his newly acquired demonic powers. I kid you not!

The Martian Crown Jewels

The third real dud in a row and another complete waste of space, that could've been used to reprint one of the many uncollected impossible crime stories by such short story specialists as Joseph Commings and Arthur Porges. But instead we get a pseudo-futuristic acid hallucination about a giant talking space chicken, who fancies himself the Martian equivalent of our Sherlock Holmes, looking into a bunch of purloined stones – and a failure to retrieve them may threaten relations between Earth and Mars. Yeah, I'm tapping out on this one.

The Day the Children Vanished by Hugh Pentecost

Hugh Pentecost picks up the slack in this fascinating story, in which a small town is thrown into panic when a school bus of children drives into a dugway and never comes out on the other side – and the solution is as clever as it is simple. But it's not just another cannily plotted locked room mystery, it's also a very well told story in its own right with a smashing end. I also dug the character Pentecost casted for the role of detective and the way in which he confronted the culprits. Possibly my favorite story of the collection!

As If by Magic by Julian Symons

Well, I learned something from this story: Symons wasn't only a first-class prick but also a hypocrite of the first water! You can't go around passing judgment on your contemporaries, for lacking a sense of realism, and than churn out a two-bit short-short, in which a typical amateur detective just so happens to be present at the same amusement pier where a murderer, before disappearing in the masses, starts stabbing away at someone and is invited by the police to help solve the case. Oh wow, that surely gave the genre a much-needed dose of reality, eh? 

I could've forgiven him this blatant hypocrisy, if he had shown Carr and Talbot how the impossible crime story should've been done and came up with something dazzling. But this is just petty and amateurish at best.

The Impossible Theft John F. Suter

This really pains me to say, but I'm developing a slight aversion for this wonderful story. It's a clever little nugget about a bet that involves the theft of a document from a tightly secured vault. The solution is brilliant and can be explained in one short sentence and the first time you read it you probably want to kick yourself, however, I have seen this story too often – and anthologists really aren't doing us a service by continues reprinting it (clever though it is). We're all very familiar with Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Doyle's "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Futrelle's "The Problem of Cell 13," and Chesterton's "The Oracle of the Dog." Now give us something we haven't read before and haven't already, at least, a dozen copies of in our collection!

Mr. Strange Takes a Field Trip by William Brittain

This pleasant, but minor, diversion tells of a very improbable disappearance of a valuable golden mask from a museum, and the only ones who were swarming that floor at the time was a school teacher and his class. At first, everyone assumes it's a pranks from two boys who sneaked off on their own, but when a search of the floor fails to turn up the missing artifact their protest starts to carry some weight – and there teacher turns detective and comes up with a solution that is both original as well as amusing.

No One Likes To Be Played for a Sucker by Michael Collins

Michael Collins is apparently one of those authors who effortlessly blends hardboiled story telling with a classic locked room puzzle. Here his one-armed private eye, Dan Fortune, is hired to keep taps on someone's business partner, but murder rears its ugly head and it involves a locked room angle. However, Collins takes a turn on that well-trodden path that leads to a slightly different hermitically shut door. The ending involves a particular kind of tough justice fitting for a story about a hardboiled gumshoe.

I really enjoy it when writers like Bill Pronzini and Michael Collins let their private eyes take on a good old-fashioned locked room mystery. It's a nice change of pace from the usual haunted mansions, harboring a boarded up room that kills its occupants, and other supernatural menaces who apparently run amok on this plane of reality.

The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini himself also provides a story for this volume of locked room riddles and his impossible problem boosts one of the most convoluted solutions I have ever come across in a short story of this kind, but what a firework display of ingenuity and imagination! The quandary the reader has to ponder over here is how a convicted murderer, a mere minute after his execution, could've vanished from a locked and watched execution shed after being dropped through its roof with a stiff rope pulled tight around his neck. Like I already pointed out, the solution is very convoluted and even knottier than its premise, but you really have to admire anyone who can dream up such a plot. John Dickson Carr would've definitely approved!

This one competes with Huge Pentecost's "The Day the Children Vanished" as the standout story of this anthology.

Box in a Box by Jack Ritchie

This story, in which a man is discovered unconscious next to his dead wife, inside a locked bedroom, and the solution the detective comes up with is only acceptable because Jack Ritchie had his tongue firmly placed in his cheek – and that's how it should be done if you're going to present the reader a hackneyed explanation like that. Yes, I'm looking at you Lillian de la Torre!  

The Number 12 Jinx by Jon L. Breen

I don't know the first thing about baseball, but this story has me intrigued and from what I gather, it’s part of an entire series of puzzle-orientated sports mysteries featuring Ed Gorgan – a major league umpire who regular sheds his sports cap for a deerstalker. In this story he look into a baseball player who, after insisting on playing as the club's jinxed number 12, disappeared under baffling circumstances. Good story, but not the most solvable one of the collection if you're absolutely clueless about the game – like yours truly.

Crippen and Landru (who else?) put out an entire collection under the title Kill the Umpire: The Calls of Ed Gorgan (2003). I think I might take a swing at this collection in the near future. It could be fun and at leasts provides a change of pace

The Magician's Wife by J.F. Peirce

The titular magician makes the equally titular wife disappear in front of a captivated crowd of policeman and their assistant, his sister-in-law, accuses him of having murdered her sister. Nothing really special, but fun enough to read.  

The Problem of the Covered Bridge by Edward D. Hoch

This is the first recorded case of Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small town medical practitioner who constantly runs into seemingly impossible murders in the small town of Northmont (Jessica Fletcher has nothing on him!), and this story has him arriving in town and setting up his practice. But the problem that requires his attention the most is the inexplicable vanishing of a horse-and-buggy from a covered bridge. The story is OK, but Hoch hadn't found his stride yet with this series. He threw some really good and even more baffling miracle problems at Dr. Hawthorne as the series progressed. I'm particular fond of "The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery," which was also the first Hoch story I ever read.

There are two collections from this series available: Diagnosis: Impossible (1996) and More Things Impossible (2006). A third collection, Nothing is Impossible (20??), is planned for the very near future.