No Coffin for the Corpse

The Great Merlini #4

by Clayton Rawson

A murdered blackmailer haunts a captain of industry

When Ross Harte gets into a screaming match with his fianc�e's father, millionaire Dudley Wolff, the old man cuts Harte's beloved out of his will. As far as Wolff is concerned, this is an empty threat, because he plans to live forever. He has a team of scientists working to extend his life as long as possible, and should they fail, a renowned psychic will contact him after his death. Wolff is obsessed with death's mysteries, and he is about to get a first-hand look. When a detective attempts to blackmail him, Wolff punches him in the jaw so hard that it stops the crook's heart. Fearing scandal, Wolff and his staff bury the body in the woods. When the dead blackmailer comes back to haunt him, the millionaire is forced to call on Harte and his friend the Great Merlini, conjurer and sleuth, to banish the spirits that have brought death to his door.

Genres: Mystery

240 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Aka Stuart Towne.

Clayton Rawson (1906 - 1971) was an American mystery writer, editor, and amateur magician. His four novels frequently invoke his great knowledge of stage magic and feature as their fictional detective The Great Merlini, a professional magician who runs a shop selling magic supplies. He also wrote four short stories in 1940 about a stage magician named Don Diavolo, who appears as a principal character in one of the novels featuring The Great Merlini. "Don Diavolo is a magician who perfects his tricks in a Greenwich Village basement where he is frequently visited by the harried Inspector Church of Homicide, either to arrest the Don for an impossible crime or to ask him to solve it.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3-ish stars of five

I read this loose old paperback after I found it in The Bin from Hell. It's got wisecracks, gimcracks, and a couple asscracks for characters. The "heroine" is a Mary Sue from the get-go, flipping out as the stupidest things. The wicked stepmother is Mrs. Danvers' bully big sister with dimwitted lines galore. The millionaire is about as stock as stock gets.

The sleuth? The sleuth. Merlini! *snort* Cutesy-poopsie-charmy-warmy.

The 1942 film replaces Merlini (whew) but with some goofball character I've never heard of before, Mike Shayne, who also bugged the snot outta me. Not the happiest of experiences all the way around, honestly not one I'd recommend on *either* medium.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good mystery, but unnecessarily busy.

The narrator is in a romance with the daughter of a stereotypical dictatorial millionaire. This eventually leads to a murder, and the investigation of a haunted house.

I'm not a fan of haunted house mysteries, and Merlini isn't really given much page time here, as the narrator is busy screwing up and getting almost arrested all the time.

Not bad, but not my favorite in the series.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spectacularly virtuoso in its complex plot development abstracted from character development, and so closely analogous to a magic trick. Quite enjoyable, even if a bit too long. At several points you think you're losing the thread of understanding what's going on, but because Rawson followed through on working out all the details, you never really lose your footing.

[Lisa Kucharski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rollicking mystery, beginning with Ross Harte in love with Kay whose father is one nasty piece of rich work. Wolfe, Kay's father, has also taken it to do anything to keep the two apart. As fate would have it, murder rolls into said household of the rich man and it seems the only one who could help is the Great Merlini (whom Kay enlists with Merlini enlisting Harte to help him.)

Since I read the first book then this, the two are similar in that there is magic people involved and some of the tricks of the magic trade are used. However, this one is much more dynamic in pace and in action. Harte is also more involved and has an idea of who the murderer is as well!

This time though Merlini doesn't have Insp. Gavigan as the police connection but someone else who is not so trusting and many times tends to get in the way more than help. I was able to figure out who the most likely person was and was right, however- the final trick was getting the murderer caught.

Some ingenious ways to kill here, Rawson really has a depth of knowledge when it comes to tricks up the sleeves!

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Choleric millionaire Dudley Wolff is neurotically afraid of death--that's why he's spent a lot of money on psychical research: to discover if there is life after death. Now that he has found a real ghost, though, he's far from happy. In fact, panic is the only word to describe his attitude. He's desperate enough to let his daughter Kay bring in the Great Merlini, who exposed one of his previous finds. There's a lot more than the ghost to worry about, though--there are a number of impossible situations that Merlini will have to explain, even though he himself is one of the top suspects of the Westchester police. The Rawson novels are curiously refreshing today, when we have a glut of vampire, ghost, zombie and other supernatural creatures roaming through the novels. Merlini gives readers all the thrills of the supernatural, plus a cool skeptical eye and a perfectly natural explanation before the end.

[Jeffrey Marks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wild ride

The book has a fascinating crime situation and multiple twists and turns; however, the explanation of the crimes takes a long time in the story.

[Yibbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any book that starts out with a magician as the hero and a moon-struck reporter as a faithful chronicler ought to be full of mysteries, tricks, and maybe magic, and this one delivers. There are disappearances from locked rooms, attacks in the dark, ghostly images caught on film, dead men leaving prints around after they are buried, and more motives than you can shake a stick at. Then there are tricks, and tricks, and more tricks. What would you expect when every other character is a magician or a spiritualist? Obviously, nothing is as it seems. But the hero, the most famous of all conjurors, is firmly determined to explain the trick that produces every spook, even if he has to use a few of his own.
Oh, it’s highly improbable, but that actually made it even more fun. Though the most distracting, even annoying thing, is the author’s tendency to rattle on and on about historic examples of whatever mystical or magical practice is in question. That got old fast, but those passages made for good sleep aids.
There were quite a few ‘mild’ curse words. About what you would find in Agatha Christie’s later works.

[Alberto Avanzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Di Rawson avevo letto tempo fa, con grandissimo piacere, due racconti a tema delitto impossibile: Il mago Merlini e l’extraterrestre, Da un altro mondo. Ero quindi curioso di provare a leggere un suo romanzo
Un giallo classico ambientato nel mondo dell’illusionismo, nel quale siamo però lontani dalla capacità di creare atmosfera che avevo trovato in Talbot e nella coppia Wislow e Quirk. I due omicidi principali sono due delitti impossibili molto belli, spiegati in modo elegante senza quelle complicazioni (la candela che brucia la corda che fa cadere l’ascia…) che a volte purtroppo si incontrano in questo tipo di libri. E ancor più, lo svelamento finale prevede la proposta e successiva smentita di ipotesi, sulla falsariga dei cioccolatini avvelenati. Purtroppo però lo stile narrativo, pur improntato a un tentativo di prendere le cose con distacco e ironia che di solito amo nei gialli, non mi ha convinto pienamente, e anche alcuni passaggi della trama sono un po’ forzati. In complesso mi sono divertito a leggerlo, ma non sarà mai fra i miei gialli preferiti

[Summer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this series went out with a whimper. Mystery authors seem to regard marrying off a protagonist as the equivalent of sending a dog to a nice farm in the country. Merlini and Ross don't spend much time talking to each other in this one, and when they do Ross is distracted and Merlini is irritated. It's not like the romance fills in the gaps - Rawson fast forwarded through how they met, and simply introduces the love interest as a fiancée, then they spend most of the book broken up or otherwise not talking to each other, and she barely appears on page in the mystery itself and doesn't manage to do anything interesting. The mystery wasn't great either - it begins with the first murder appearing on the page with third person narration instead of Ross, and was not particularly interesting or hard to solve. I doubt I'll read this one again, but I am going to try the short stories.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breezily written, entertaining plot, intricate solution. A surprisingly strong and solid novel from the author of the class Death From A Top Hat. Mystery novels from 1942 are typically very dated and suffer from stiffness and awkward social interactions. This has a few anachronisms (i.e., reference to 1927 being "recent") but it holds up very well. I enjoyed the magician/detective Merlini's personality, the almost requisite bad-tempered police lieutenant and the assortment of oddballs that make up the cast. A pleasant surprise.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Merlini.

[Brian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Way too many long-winded, overly-involved speculations and side tracks. Too clever for its own good so that it's buried in self importance. Never cared about any of the characters.

[Jason Reeser · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It is full of snappy dialog, a multitude of suspects popping out of the author's top hat, and prestidigitation scattered like confetti across a magician's stage. There's plenty of spooky atmosphere, as well as fascinating mini-lectures on historical tidbits about psychics and magicians and escape artists. So what's not to like?

Well, what's not to like is the delivery. On stage, a magician's delivery is everything, and here, Rawson needlessly entangles this story in a point-of-view that left me wondering why the character who is telling the story even exists? Add to this Rawson's endless desire to explain and clear up every possible plot hole ad nauseum, and it left me wishing I could stand up and leave the theater. I didn't, so as not to cause a disturbance among all the people sitting around me, but I'm just that sort of good-guy.

I mentioned snappy dialog. It was snappy, to be sure. Frenetic might be a better word for it. Everyone shoots lines out like they're in a stage-play where all the actors want to finish early so they can leave for an audition at a better theater. I kept expecting some of the characters to pass out since none of them had a chance to take a breath as they bantered back and forth with speculations, theories, accusations, and alibis.

The police detective, Flint, that arrives to solve the murder, suspects everyone, and continually threatens to arrest...everyone. He seems to have no discernment at all. This is important to Rawson, who makes sure we constantly worry that the magician, Merlini, or the narrator, Ross, will end up convicted of a murder they didn't do. Which makes little sense. It would be like watching Inspector Japp spend the whole book chasing Poirot. I mean, Japp is pretty slow, be he's not that dumb. And this Flint cannot be this dumb either. But he seems to be.

As for Merlini...

He's the main character here. Rawson's series, I suppose, follows this magician as he solves mysteries that are centered around magic. And he fits the bill for this role. He's a magician, of course, which means he's secretive, keeps his cards up his sleeve, and seems to confuse the detective more than he helps him. Sure, he figures it all out in the end, but the leaps of logic and the coincidental use of magic/illusion that goes on with a magician in the house is all a bit too much to take.

I haven't even mentioned the plot. And why should I? I love a preposterous, overly complicated murder mystery. This one is wide-open, with talk of ghosts, zombies, and true love. I had no trouble swallowing such farce, that's the fun of these books, and what I was hoping for. I just think Rawson needed to clean it up a bit, slow down the break-neck speed, and not spend so much time explaining everything.

I may read another one of these, but I would need to be rested up before I tried it.

[Jessi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dudley Wolff was not making friends on the night the book opens. First, he threatened to cut his daughter out of his will. Then he fired her suitor. After that, he threatened to cut off the two scientists he'd been funding. And now a mysterious stranger has appeared in his study demanding to see him. A stranger demanding blackmail money. A stranger that Mr. Wolff kills. A stranger who seemingly returns as a ghost.
His daughter decides to hire the Great Merlini (not knowing about the dead man) to help discover what is going on at the Wolff escape when there start to be strange sounds and valuable vases that suddenly fall over when no one is nearby. Then Dudley Wolff ends up dead and the girl's suitor (our third person narrator) is tipped out the window and then blamed for the death.
It was an interesting solution but somewhat convoluted. I liked the Great Merlini and will hopefully have the chance to read some more.
Heard about this one on the Classic Mysteries podcast.

[Ron Kerrigan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magical mystery tour-de-force. The Great Merlini tackles locked rooms and murderers who are themselves already dead in this Golden Age mystery featuring an ex-magician who runs a shop selling illusions to others while explaining other's illusions that hide murder. Best enjoyed if you let yourself be taken along on the ride.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

read SOMETIME in 2006