1 | [[quoteright:329:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/death_from_a_top_hat.jpg]] |
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3 | The Great Merlini was the lead character of four Golden Age mystery novels and twelve short stories. He was a stage magician who had retired to run a magic supply shop in New York City. Merlini's adventures were written by Clayton Rawson, himself a trained magician. (One of Merlini's signature tricks, vanishing a lit cigarette, was done the same way Rawson did it.) |
4 | |
5 | The novels are: |
6 | * ''Death from a Top Hat'' (1938) |
7 | * ''The Footprints on the Ceiling'' (1939) |
8 | * ''The Headless Lady'' (1940) |
9 | * ''No Coffin for the Corpse'' (1942) |
10 | |
11 | The short stories were published in ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'' between 1946 and 1971 (the last one published after Rawson's death). They were later collected in ''The Great Merlini: The Complete Stories of the Magician Detective''. |
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13 | Two of the Merlini novels were turned into movies, but with heavy editing. ''Miracles For Sale'' is based on ''Death From A Top Hat'', though with the lead character's name changed. ''The Man Who Wouldn't Die'' took ''No Coffin For The Corpse'' and spliced in a more popular fictional detective of the time (Michael Shayne). |
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15 | Rawson wrote a pilot episode for a Merlini TV show in 1951, but it wasn't picked up by the networks. |
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17 | ---- |
18 | !!The series provides examples of: |
19 | |
20 | * AssholeVictim: Linda Skelton of ''Footprints On The Ceiling''. She deliberately administered a toxin to another character to destroy his career on the stage. |
21 | * AlwaysMurder: Averted in one short story (poisoning to scare the victim, but a deliberately nonlethal dose), but played straight everywhere else. |
22 | * BulletCatch: A performance of this trick is the climax of ''Death from a Top Hat''. The murderer tried to sabotage the trick to ensure the performer (a possible witness against him) would die. Too bad the whole trick was set up as a trap for him, including a marksman firing the gun who was under strict orders to miss. |
23 | * CircusBrat: Merlini was the child of a family of circus acrobats, and got his initial training in stage magic from the sideshow's magician. |
24 | * ColdReading: Merlini uses this technique in one of the short stories to figure out what the murderer did with an important piece of evidence. |
25 | * CutPhoneLines: In ''Footprints On The Ceiling''. Ross and Merlini manage a temporary patch to call in Inspector Gavigan ... and then the lines get cut ''again''. |
26 | * EmptyPilesOfClothing: The locked room in one of the short stories contained one corpse with a gunshot wound, one unconscious nude man, the man's clothing laying in perfect order on the floor as if he'd phased out of it, and absolutely no sign of a gun. |
27 | * FairPlayWhodunnit: Six of the short stories were written as reader contests for ''[=EQMM=]'', the rest of the series also fits this trope. |
28 | * FriendOnTheForce: Inspector Gavigan already knew Merlini at the beginning of the first novel. |
29 | * TheGreatWhodini: [[SubvertedTrope Subverted]] -- Merlini is his real family name. And as the child of a long line of circus equestrians, it never had any association with stage magic until he started hanging around the sideshow's magician as a kid. |
30 | * LastNameBasis: According to the front door of Merlini's shop, his first initial is A. Everyone just calls him "Merlini", we never learn his first name. |
31 | ** Averted with Ross Harte, the narrator for all four novels and several of the stories -- he's routinely called Ross. |
32 | * LockedRoomMystery |
33 | * MadameFortune: Madame Rappourt. |
34 | * MagicianDetective |
35 | * MedicationTampering: In ''The Footprints on the Ceiling'', Madame Rappourt routinely took "trance capsules" containing morphine and scopolamine before conducting a seance. When another character in the novel thinks she's developing mediumistic abilities and begs Rappourt to let her try the capsules, Rappourt empties out a couple and fills them with [[PlaceboEffect sugar]] instead. Then before she can hand over the altered capsules, the murderer spikes them with cyanide. |
36 | * MurderByMistake: the solution for one of the short stories. |
37 | ** Also [[spoiler:Linda Skelton]] -- the poison was intended for another character. |
38 | * PhoneyCall: One suspect in ''Death From A Top Hat'' claimed she'd placed one of these to the murder victim to make her husband jealous. |
39 | * SafeCracking: Merlini uses a variant on the stethoscope to retrieve the victim's will in ''The Footprints on the Ceiling'' -- a pocket watch-sized gadget (supposedly a present from Creator/HarryHoudini) with a vibrating needle to indicate when a tumbler had fallen into place. |
40 | * ShootOutTheLock: Subverted in ''Death From A Top Hat''. When a policeman tried to force entrance into a home, he shoots at the lock and does such a good job of jamming it that before the latest corpse can be hauled off to autopsy, the door hinges have to be removed. (This seriously annoyed the murderer -- that killing wasn't ''supposed'' to look like a LockedRoomMystery, but the police bullets turned it into one.) |
41 | * StallingTheSip: Played with during the SummationGathering in ''The Footprints on the Ceiling''. Ross thinks this trope is in play as Merlini spends over half a chapter not drinking his glass of vermouth. (The first murder discovered in the novel was a poisoning.) When Merlini actually takes a drink, Ross dives across the room to knock the glass from his hand. Merlini nearly hurts himself laughing — he knew the drink was safe [[spoiler:because he knew the murderer was already dead]], he'd just been too busy talking to take a sip. |
42 | * TamperingWithFoodAndDrink: Forty-two years before the ''Series/BreakingBad'' finale, a dose of poison is added to a sugar packet at a diner. |
43 | * TapOnTheHead: Several people get clonked on the head during ''The Footprints on the Ceiling''. The only one who suffers more than brief unconsciousness and a bit of a headache is Colonel Watrous. |
44 | * ViolinScam: One minor character in ''The Footprints on the Ceiling'' turned out to have quite the reputation for a variant of this scam. He would go into a small town, acting like a businessman from the big city, then "lose his custom-made glass eye" [[note]] the character still had both of his real eyes[[/note]] in a shop. Later that day, an accomplice would "find" a glass eye there, the shopowner would buy the eye expecting to get a huge reward from the businessman, then find the businessman had vanished from his hotel. |
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