I’ve been reading a fair bit about magicians lately – outside of detective fiction (OK, still for mystery fiction reasons). With the ideas of performance and misdirection in mind, it seemed like the perfect time to reread the first appearance of magician-detective The Great Merlini.
This book is all about the impossible crimes and the complex puzzle tying them together. This time round I could confirm that the who and how really were all laid out fairly – not so much the why, which is one of those “attach given motive to the correct person due to a minor similarity” ones.
There are two major puzzles here. The first is the death of Cesare Sabbat, found strangled in a summoning circle inside his locked apartment – sheer drops outside, no secret passages, the usual rigmarole that has to be confirmed for a locked room puzzle.
Then another character is found dead in their apartment – also locked. But this time there’s a way out – a ladder leading to the garden… which is full of pristine snow.
Both fiendish seeming puzzles. There’s also a minor incident where a character vanishes from their police trail. Rawson wisely chooses to have Merlini explain that right after it happens, showing the reader early on that both Merlini and the writer can come up with the solution when it counts.

I don’t remember my initial reactions to the solutions, when they were a surprise to me. The individual solutions are solid but not stunning – with one of them in particular being given in a way almost guaranteed to cause disappointment, and another incorporating something that’s often dubious in detective fiction. But it’s the links between the crimes, the solution as a whole, that draws the answers together to become more than the sum of their parts.

“Suspects hopping in and out like mad, questions and answers popping six dozen to the minute, detectives swarming, Harte writing a book on the back of an envelope, photographers climbing all over me, fingerprint experts spraying powder down my neck, and every ten minutes the whole blamed case does a triple somersault over six elephants and lands on its neck.”

The Great Merlini sums things up

The twists that establish the nature of these puzzles are all well paced, and indeed Rawson hardly lets up as Merlini dashes back and forth across New York to solve the crime. Like his friend John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson knew how to deliver an end of chapter twist – or an end of chapter joke which also works as a reveal. The sentence to sentence writing also moves at a fast, quippy clip, at least for the most part. Merlini does have a tendency to sound off about obscure topics. When that topic is Carr’s Locked Room Lecture, this is fine. When that topic is occult studies, this is much less relevant to the plot. It’s also irrelevant to the atmosphere. When Merlini treats the supernatural as a joke (usually at Inspector Gavigan’s expense) and narrator Ross Harte treats it as an opportunity for wisecracks, no reader is really going to be convinced that a demon is going round New York strangling people.

Though Inspector Gavigan calls Merlini “worse than Philo Vance” at one point, he’s not really that kind of character. Merlini doesn’t seem to take himself that seriously. Any action he takes not connected to the crime is always focused on a trick or moment of performance, which is entertaining to watch, and does make him stand out as a detective. The moments of lecturing are more like magician’s patter than a know-it-all attitude, though they undeniably interrupt the flow of the story.

As you might guess from the puzzle focus, Rawson isn’t too interested in character here, but he does make the suspects effectively distinctive. All of them are tied to performance and deception in some way. This is often used to good, but brief, effect, such as the “clairvoyant” pair who really manage their trick through secret communication – making interviewing them difficult. We don’t see enough of these colourful characters to get much of an impression after the action moves to the second murder, though. But it’s enough for this kind of mystery.
Inspector Homer Gavigan gets the short end of the character stick with his predictably (and repetitively) furious responses to new twists or to Merlini’s antics. Ross Harte gets a little bit to him outside of being good with wisecracks – when the book opens he’s writing a terrible opinion article about why detective fiction is worn out, and padding its wordcount shamelessly by listing every single cliche. He’s an engaging, detective-fiction savvy narrator, but doesn’t offer anything more than that.

This is actually the third time I’ve read this book. The first time, I liked it a lot. The second time, I was bored. This time? It seems like this was exactly what I was looking for in a read this time round. Complex enough to keep me trying to fit it all together in my head, but also light and quippy in tone. Fast-moving, with plenty of incident. The too-frequently-repeated character notes grated a little but didn’t ruin the experience for me. Maybe the fact that I knew what was going on let me enjoy the mechanics more. This really is detective fiction for the mechanics fanatic.

Other opinions:

Beneath the Stains of Time
crossexaminingcrime
The Green Capsule
The Invisible Event
Mysteries Ahoy
Tangled Yarns