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!