The Complete Collection of The Great Merlini Mysteries. Sixteen Novels and Stories. Illustrated : Death from a Top Hat, The Footprints on the Ceiling, The Headless Lady, No Coffin for the Corpse and Others, livre ebook

The Complete Collection of The Great Merlini Mysteries. Sixteen Novels and Stories. Illustrated gathers together the full range of Clayton Rawson’s celebrated tales featuring one of the most original detectives of the Golden Age — The Great Merlini, the magician-sleuth who exposes the truth behind the impossible.
Part illusionist, part logician, and wholly unconventional, Merlini is a retired stage magician who runs a small magic shop in New York. When crimes occur that seem supernatural — locked rooms with no exits, bodies that vanish, footprints that defy gravity, and murders staged like elaborate tricks — the police turn to the one man who understands deception better than anyone. To Merlini, every “miracle” has a method, every mystery a rational explanation.
This illustrated omnibus includes the classic novels Death from a Top Hat, The Footprints on the Ceiling, The Headless Lady, No Coffin for the Corpse, along with a rich selection of ingenious short stories. Each case offers fair-play clues, theatrical misdirection, and puzzles that challenge the reader to separate magic from murder.
Blending wit, suspense, and the fascinating world of professional stagecraft, Rawson’s stories stand among the finest examples of the impossible-crime tradition. Clever, atmospheric, and endlessly entertaining, this complete collection is an essential volume for fans of classic detective fiction and intricate mysteries where nothing is quite what it seems.
Contents:
• Novels:
- Death from a Top Hat
- The Footprints on the Ceiling
- The Headless Lady
- No Coffin for the Corpse
• Short Stories:
- The Clue of the Tattooed Man
- The Clue of the Broken Legs
- The Clue of the Missing Motive
- From Another World
- Off the Face of the Earth
- Merlini and the Lie Detector
- Merlini and the Vanished Diamonds
- Merlini and the Sound Effects Murder
- Nothing Is Impossible
- Miracles – All in the Day’s Work
- Merlini and the Photographic Clue
- The World’s Smallest Locked Room