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A Magically Good Read

A look at some ripping yarns with a touch of magic.

(If you fancy reading any of these books, click the link and buy from Amazon.co.uk)

You might have deduced from the improbable yarns elsewhere on this site, that I am rather fond of fiction of a somewhat fantastical nature. What may not be so readily apparent is that I am also a student of the arcane arts of mentalism (that’s ‘mind reading’ by a fancy name). Whether or not mindreading counts as magic, I shall leave you to decide. However, magic and book reading is what this page is all about. Surprisingly,magic fiction is a remarkably productive genre. If you are looking for racy read, read on...

Latest Review : Rim Of The Pit (1944) by Hake Talbot
This book is out of print but you may be able to pick up a copy from one of the online 2nd hand book dealers if you are lucky. I am grateful to a fellow magical detection enthusiast for sending me a copy. Hake Talbot was the nom de plume of the magician and writer, Henning Nelms. The book has all the ingredients of a classic 'country house' ghost/crime/horror novel - a group of people gathered together in a snowbound house miles away from anywhere - a seance, ghostly visitations, a murder and various clues to a seemingly 'impossible' crime. This is a decent enough tale that has some of the characteristics of a Clayton Rawson or John Dickson Carr novel (the presence of a magician and mysterious footprints in the snow recalls Carr's masterful 'Hollow Man', written some years earlier). The complications and improbabilities do come a little too thick and fast for my own tastes. But, just as long as you don't take it too seriously, it's a pretty entertaining yarn....

Many of the best magic fiction tales are crime stories featuring detectives ranging from the fictional Doctor Gideon Fell to the real-life Houdini. Not all magical stories are based on crime. However, some of the most memorable are, so let’s start first with a look at a sadly forgotten classic from the ‘Golden Age’…

The Headless Lady (1940) by Clayton Rawson is a wonderfully convoluted romp featuring the magician/detective, The Great Merlini. Rawson was himself a magician (he contributed various card and ‘mind reading’ tricks to magic magazines and books – some of which are still used by magicians today) and the novels contain numerous small details that will be recognised by anyone with a knowledge of conjuring.

Merlini is a suave, dashing character who seems to be the master of just about every branch of magic from cards to escapology. He also creates and sells illusions at his own Magic Shop. As with all classic detective stories of the period, the adventure begins with the arrival of a glamorous dame:

“Mr. Merlini?” Her tone was polite but businesslike.
“Yes.” He nodded taking her in.
“I need a headless lady,” she said, “I have to have it at once.”

The story quickly develops into a bizarre murder mystery that takes Merlini into the strange world of a travelling circus. Here he meets a colourful cast of characters ranging from Irma King the elephant trainer to Tex Mayo an ex-movie star who now does a Wild West show. The supporting cast includes a sword swallower, some mentalists, acrobats, tightrope walkers and a ‘three card monte grifter’ (a professional card cheat).

One of the great delights of this book is the extensive use of circus and magical slang of the era. If you want to know the difference between a ‘gaff’ and a ‘gimmick’, or if you aren’t sure what a ‘kinker’ or ‘bull boss’ might be, this book reveals all. Rawson provides compendious footnotes to explain the jargon as well as the history of various magical tricks. Once you’ve read The Headless Lady, you’ll have no problem translating the following extract:

“There was a fly gee in the tip with a big mittful of folding scratch. He thought he could pick me up, so I let him see me take out the crimp. Then I crossed him up by putting it back in the same broad! He was all set to spring me when Paper-Collar Ed, who was weeding the sticks, rumbled the gaff trying to duke the cush back to me…” (it goes on the same vein, but you get the drift…)

This is a highly entertaining read even if you can’t follow all the twists and turns of the plot. It’s a shame Rawson wrote so few Merlini novels. And a greater shame that only this one is currently in print.

John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (also known as The Three Coffins, published in 1935) is regarded by many as one the finest of all ‘impossible crime’ novels. It also happens to feature a magician in a key role.

Carr was the absolute master of the ‘locked-room’ murder mystery. He wrote dozens of books in which the vast, wheezing, hulking, somewhat sinister figure of Dr. Gideon Fell solved bizarre murders.

The Hollow Man begins with a man being shot inside a locked room. Later, another man is killed in an empty street that is watched from both ends. In both cases, it seems impossible that any murderer could have arrived and departed from the scene of the crime without leaving any trace. I don’t want to give the game away, but suffice to say that a knowledge of some of the arts of illusion might help you to solve at least one of the murders (though then again, maybe it won’t. It didn’t help me to solve it anyhow!).

The crimes in Carr’s novels, while carefully worked out, tend to be complex and devious. I’ve read lots of his novels (some, written under the name, Carter Dickson, feature the fat and humorous detective, Sir Henry Merrivale) and I cannot in all honesty claim to have solved any of them completely prior to the detective’s explanation at the end. Carr is one of the greatest of the ‘golden age’ detective writers and it’s a mystery to me that, while Agatha Christie remains ever popular, Carr has been largely forgotten.

There is also a BBC dramatised radio version of The Hollow Man (plus another John Dickson Carr adventure, The House In Gallows Lane) starring Donald Sinden as a wonderfully plummy Dr. Fell...

Now let’s come up to date with a contemporary novelist whose novels take us further back in time. The Dime Museum Murders by Daniel Stashower is the first in a series of lively detective stories featuring no less a detective than Harry Houdini. This novel takes place in 1897 in New York City. It tells the story of the young Houdini at a time when he is still struggling to make a name for himself in cheap sideshows. Obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, Harry is delighted to be called in to help the police department solve a bizarre ‘locked room murder’.

Although a modern novel (1999), The Dime Museum Murders is clearly in the tradition of classic crime fiction by the likes of John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson. It’s pretty fast paced, atmospheric and surprisingly funny. The story, incidentally, is narrated by Harry’s brother and manager, ‘Dash’ Hardeen. The young Harry Houdini is an interesting character, not only clever and ambitious but often quite oblivious to the humour caused by his own pomposity. Here’s a typical example Harry has just arrived on the scene of the murder. He is greeted by a big beefy man in a rumpled brown suit:

“Name’s Patrick Murray,” he said in a voice not long out of Dublin, “I’m the detective in charge of this case. Appreciate your answering my wire.”
“Hmm,” said Harry, stepping back to appraise our new acquaintance, “Patrick Murray. You are Irish, I perceive.”
Strange to say, Harry wasn’t kidding either. Murray looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. “I can see you’re going to be a big help to us, Mr Houdini,” he said.
“I shall certainly do my best to assist in whatever way possible,” said my brother, who was a bit tone deaf when it came to irony.

This is a fun novel but Stashower sometimes steps over the fine line between comedy and farce, which occasionally makes the humour seem a bit forced. All the same, a rip-roaring tale and a welcome addition to the genre.

The fictional adventures of another real-life magician are described in Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats The Devil (2001). Set in the 1920s, this novel (Gold’s first) mixes real characters and incidents with pure fantasy. The famous stage magician, Charles Carter, becomes involved in a convoluted story that involves everything from cutting edge inventions to the murder of an American president. There are tricks, adventures, romance, travel and even a few pirates!

It’s a strange, often rambling book that veers from more or less straight ‘biography’ to unadulterated melodrama. A bit long, perhaps, at over 560 pages and the pace is not always quite as tight as it might be. Nonetheless, an enjoyable read – and a well researched insight into life and magic in the early part of the 20th Century.

Paul Quarrington’s The Spirit Cabinet is an even more fantastical romp than ‘Carter Beats The Devil’. Set in modern day Las Vegas, it tells the story of two gay German magicians, Jurgen and Rodolfo. If you think these characters sound like barely disguised fictional versions of the Las Vegas magicians, Siegfried and Roy, I’d say you might have a point. However, in spite of their lavish stage show and their fondness for white tigers, Jurgen and Rodolfo aren’t really ‘real life’ characters at all. Their story is even too bizarre for Las Vegas – and that’s saying something!

The novel recounts the strange sequence of events that follows on from the magicians’ purchase of a rare collection of artefacts from Houdini’s personal collection, including the authentic Spirit Cabinet, which formerly featured in the Davenport Brother’s famous ‘spirit manifestations’. But is the cabinet just an old stage prop? Or does it really have strange powers? And if it has, what forces might it unleash upon its owners?

Unfortunately, the novel supplies more questions than answers and, in spite of a promising beginning, I personally felt that it fizzled out towards the end. Still, there are enough memorable characters and humorous incidents in the book to make it a worthwhile read.

After reading this, one trick that I definitely won’t be attempting to perform is the legendary Cingalese miracle of ‘Lifting A Human Being With Power From Eyes’. I won’t give the game away, but suffice to say my optician would not approve…

Richard Matheson’s Now You See It... (1994) sounds like a classic slice of magical Gothic horror. The action place inside a single room (the ‘Magic Room’), where nothing is quite what it seems. The narrator is one Maximilian Delacorte, once the world’s greatest magician but now confined, speechless and immobile, to a wheelchair. here he is a helpless witness of the most terrible crimes committed either by or to (I won’t say which!) his beloved son, who is also a magician. The room, the plot and even the characters are rarely quite what they seem. The action is driven by gimmicks, illusion, disguise and misdirection.

You might expect Matheson to be the perfect author to bring this tale to life. After all, his previous books include such classics of the weird and macabre as The Shrinking Man and the apocalyptic vampire novel, I Am Legend. However, in spite of some very good ideas, the ‘Now You See It…’ is ultimately a bit of a disappointment. There are just too many twists, and the characters clearly belong in a soap opera. As a result, the book is en entertaining but rather thinly stretched yarn. Good camp nonsense for a long rain or plane journey. But if you want to sample Matheson at his best, get I Am Legend instead.

Unlike the other books on this page, Tahir Shah’s Sorceror’s Apprentice isn’t fiction at all - or is it? The truth of the matter is that this tale of travel and adventure across India is so fantastical that it’s hard to determine where the plain truth ends and the author’s fertile imagination begins.

Having been captivated by the strange and dangerous illusions of an Indian magician in his childhood, the adult Shah determines to travel from the English countryside to India in order to seek out the secrets of a master magician. On his travels he encounters a bewildering array of swamis, sorcerors, godmen, healers and crooks. One man can make anything taste sweet just by touching it. Another man sews lemons onto his stomach. Shah himself learns how to swallow stones, eat glass and make flowers bow down on command.

All in all, this is a wonderful, exciting, funny and downright peculiar book. Perhaps a bit too full of wonders and coincidences to be entirely believable. But then again, you never can tell…

There are, of course, lots of other novels that could be described as ‘magic fiction’. Some, such as The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone describe worlds in which magic is ‘real’. Then there’s James Flint’s recent addition to the fiction of stage magic, ‘52 Ways to Magic America’. This tells the story of a British boy who dreams of becoming a famous Las Vegas magician and devotes his life to realising his dream. I haven’t read this book yet. It’s had some positive reviews, though, and it is on my ‘reading list’…

If you are in the mood for short stories rather than novels, The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes (edited by Mike Ashley), contains a mix of some great old classics, some decent new stories and, unfortunately, quite a few totally forgettable yarns. Highlights include a good John Dickson Carr story and a bizarre tale by Jacques Futrelle which starts with a motor boat 'driven by a dead man'. For lovers of magic fiction, however, the real reason for buying this book is to read Clayton Rawson's splendid Merlini story, Off The Face Of The Earth, in which someone walks into a telephone booth and vanishes! Rawson uses the arts of misdirection as no other writer. This volume, incidentally, has a foreword by David Renwick who created the TV magician/detective, Jonathan Creek.

Well, that’s just a tiny dip into the world of magic in fiction. More will be added later. Meanwhile, if you want to learn to do some real magic – everything from card and coin tricks to mind reading and stage illusions, I’d recommend that you start with Mark Wilson’s excellent Cyclopedia of Magic. This is a small book that’s packed with great tricks, all of which are superbly illustrated. It’s not just a book for beginners either. Many experienced magicians still refer to Mark Wilson’s book for ideas and effects. Terrific value!

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