Death From a Top Hat (American Mystery Classics)

Death From a Top Hat (American Mystery Classics) by Clayton Rawson

Now retired from the tour circuit on which he made his name, master magician The Great Merlini spends his days running a magic shop in New York's Times Square and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. The cops call him when faced with crimes so impossible that they can only be comprehended by a magician's mind. In the most recent case, two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist, so it's clear that the crimes took place in a realm that Merlini knows well. But in the end, it will take his logical skills, and not his magical ones, to apprehend the killer.

Death From a Top Hat is an ingeniously plotted puzzle set in the world of New York stage magic at its pinnacle in the early twentieth century.

Clayton Rawson (1906 - 1971) was a novelist, editor, and magician, best known for creating The Great Merlini, the illusionist and amateur sleuth introduced in Death From a Top Hat.