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Friday, April 10, 2020

FFB: The Footprints on the Ceiling - Clayton Rawson

In preparation for my upcoming "In GAD We Trust" podcast with JJ (of The Invisible Event) on stage magic, theatrical devices and misdirection in GAD fiction I thought I'd finish up the series of Great Merlini mysteries which shamefully have been on my shelves for over twenty years and still remain unread. I did not get along with Death from a Top Hat (1938) when I read it decades ago, but I did very much enjoy all of the Don Diavolo stories Rawson wrote as "Stuart Towne" which I gobbled up within days and wished there were more. Since I was approaching this read from an older and wiser perspective and also because I was specifically looking at tricks and misdirection I did enjoy The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) almost as much as the Don Diavolo novellas. There are still elements of the Great Merlini novels that irritate the hell out of me and I'll talk about those in the podcast, but here's my basic impression of the book along with "Things I Learned" (as you will with any of Rawson's mystery stories and novels) that seem to make up about 75% of the book.

This is one of the many mysteries between 1900 and 1940 dealing with spiritualism debunking and the trickery and gadgetry that was (and probably still is) employed by fake mediums and phony psychics.  Two characters from Death from a Top Hat re-appear in Footprints on the Ceiling in an altogether different light and play much larger roles in the novel.

Merlini is going to host a new radio show on NBC called "The Ghost Hour" and his pal Colonel Watrous asks him to come to Skelton Island where their former associate from Death from a Top Hat Madame Eva Rappourt is hosting a seance for agoraphobic Linda Skelton obsessed with psychic phenomena and the drug induced trances she thinks will help cure her of her mental illness. Watrous is beginning to think that Madame Rappourt, whose powers he previously extolled in a book called Modern Mediums, is in fact one of the most clever frauds he ever encountered. Merlini and his playwright friend Ross Harte (our narrator) travel to Skelton Island armed with skepticism and infrared cameras hoping to catch the medium in the act of an elaborate charade and expose her with the photographs they plan to take while the seance is conducted in the dark.

Of course something goes wrong the minute they arrive on the island.  On route to the seance Merlini tells Harte about the legend of a pirate who supposedly haunts the island.  The two men see lights in an abandoned house on the north end of the island and rush to investigate. There they find the rigid dead body of Linda Skelton who has apparently been poisoned with cyanide. How and why did an agoraphobic who never left the main house end up so far away? And who killed her?

The story is one of the most complicated plots I've read of any era, let alone the Golden Age.  It's filled to the brim with baffling incidents that all seem to be impossible. A fire that no one could have started, the transporting of Linda's body to the haunted house, a bullet that seems to have traveled around a corner at 45 degree angle, a seemingly encoded message found on a typewriter ribbon, a nude body found in a locked hotel room, and of course the titular marks found on the ceiling at the scene of Linda Skelton's death. Magic, misdirection, acrobatics and clever gadgets all play a part in the solution of the various mysteries and murders.

There are many mini-lectures in this murder mystery reminding me of one of the issues I had with Death from a Top Hat. Rawson is one of the writers who likes to fill his books with arcane information and minutiae and go on at length. It was like reading a 1930s version of an X-Files script. But at least in the TV show those lectures were brief. We get overly detailed lectures on caisson disease ("the bends") and the precautions needed in decompression to prevent that condition; the diagnosis, causes and treatment of agoraphobia; three pages listing shipwrecks and lost treasures and the 1939 dollar values placed on those treasures ranging between 8 to 100 million; and three other things I'll discuss in the Things I Learned section. Had these lengthy lectures been condensed or removed the book could easily be 25 - 75 pages shorter. OH! and there are Van Dine-like footnotes, too!

The cast of characters consists of so many rascals, evidence tinkerers, vengeful would-be murderers, that at one point it almost seems like a parody of Murder on the Orient Express (1934). As a consequence of the convoluted shenanigans of this shifty devious group, in addition to unmasking the somewhat surprising murderer, everyone is arrested for some offense and hauled away by the police. The many pronouncements of this teeming mass of miscreants and their misdeeds makes for a long trawl through the final chapters consisting of three -- count 'em three -- summing-up explanations unnecessarily peppered with tangential commentary and sarcastic quips from Merlini. It goes on interminably and the many readers will no doubt find themselves agreeing with the impatient and irascible Inspector Gavigan who keeps demanding that Merlini get to the point faster.

Original map of Skelton Island used as frontispiece in US 1st edition
(Click to enlarge for to see all the detail)

THINGS I LEARNED:  Simon Lake (1866-1945) was a mechanical engineer and inventor who specialized in designing and building submarines and salvage equipment for the burgeoning underwater construction industry and salvage and recovery businesses.  He is mentioned in passing and provides a major clue to a fine detail in a portion of the solution. For more on Lake's ingenious work visit this website.

This is more of a refresher for me rather than something wholly new, but Ross Harte launches into monologue mode in the chapter titled "Thirty Deadly Poisons" with a litany of toxic chemicals. He reminds us that photography is one of the most poisonous professions of the pre-World War 2 era and could prove hazardous to one's health if not fatal.

I learned of an unusual dermatological side effect of the use of silver nitrate in medicine called argyria. It's an irreversible condition in which the silver turns one's skin blue-gray. Merlini talks of the Blue Men (and sometimes women) who suffered from this horror and tells Harte and Dr. Gail many of these people joined circus sideshows in order to make a living and escape shame and embarrassment in "normal" civilization.

Even with the long lectures, the complicated plot and several subplots, and Merlini's insufferable ego and sarcasm it cannot be denied that Rawson has made the book exciting and action filled. The opening chapters read more like an adventure novel than a murder mystery. Footprints on the Ceiling mixes haunted house legends, pirate lore, the search for lost treasure, deep sea diving techniques and new inventions, con artists and fraudulent spiritualism, and circus performers in a dizzying plot of inventive murders and ingenious criminality. Rawson almost succeeds in making his second novel a brilliant addition to American mysteries of the Golden Age. His penchant for show off esoterica so reminiscent of the Philo Vance and Ellery Queen novels and the innumerable instances of shunning the fair play techniques of his colleagues, however, keep this mystery novel from being a true masterpiece. As it stands it can only be thought of as a clever and entertaining diversion.

19 comments:

  1. Ben reviewed this at The Green Capsule recently, and between the two of you I'm now even more interested in tracking down a copy -- I'll repeat here the faint hope that Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics range might reprint this (having done Death from a Top Hat already) because maybe someone with the power to make it happen...will.

    Very much looking forward to getting into magic in GAD with you John!

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    1. I'm sending you a reading list in case you have time to brush up on some titles, have access to the books and stories, or already own them. Check your email later today (Sat, April 11) I feel like a professor! Looking forward to it.

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    2. Well, in the style of my university days, fully expect me not to complete the reading list when you send it on ;)

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  2. I actually found the mini-lectures to be the one thing that kept my interest. Rawson doesn't pull off the trivia in as endearing a way as Herbert Brean, but it was interesting nonetheless. What I found less enjoyable was the detective work. There was something reminiscent of early Ellery Queen about it, and the trivia was my savior from the monotony. Thankfully it all came together really well in the end, and in hindsight there was a lot more going on than I realized. Overall, a success.

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    1. Yes, it had a Van Dine/Queen feel to it. I didn't dislike the lectures. I always enjoy learning new things, but the lost treasure bit went on too long and the poisons in the use of photography was overkill. Lectures about poison in commercial business and industry was very popular in the 1930s in mystery fiction. This is the fourth one I know of. Others occur in The Fifth Tumbler by Clyde Clason, The Problem of the Green Capsule, and one of the Kent Murdock mysteries by George Harmon Coxe.

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  3. Rick Robinson says:
    I read the collected short stories earlier this year and posted a mini-review on my blog www.tipthewink.net. I enjoyed quite a lot. I have Death From A Top Hat in ebook, but have not gotten to it.

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    1. Merlini is much better in short story form than in full length novels based on my experience and from what I've read in critical collections about this era of crime fiction. I've only read the first two novels, and about five of the short stories. The Don Diavolo novellas are much better, IMO, probably again because of the shorter length. I think this one is better than ... Top Hat as far as maintaining interest and in its unusual backgrounds of deep sea diving and treasure hunting. In that aspect it's like a forerunner to the Clive Cussler adventure novels of the 70s and early 80s. I had a huge problem with some of the "impossible problems" in Death from a Top Hat. I've got two more Merlini novels to read. Consensus among bloggers is the best is the last. I'll soon find out and will be reporting back to you all.

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    2. Wait, isn't No Coffin for the Corpse the last one? Yeesh, I'm not sure I'd advise going in to that expecting it to tbe the best... But then you always find points of interest that would have eluded me, so who's to say? But from memory the Detection and esoterica in that one are very, very shoddy. Will be interested to see what you make of it.

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    3. I'm quite certain that consensus everywhere, not only among bloggers, is that the fourth volume is by far the worst. Though lately the third novel has been gaining some of the same reputation... :)

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    4. Now where on earth did I read that three bloggers thought that No Coffin for the Corpse was the best? Am I hallucinating? I wonder if I'm confusing it with some other book that had "Coffin" in the title. I can't be The Three Coffins, most likely something else. Oh well. I ought to stop making blanket comments like that. My memory is certainly not what it used to be.

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    5. It's been years since I read these, but I thought the last one was the best.

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    6. Aha! Thanks Mark for chiming in. I knew I read it somewhere. Perhaps on the GAD Yahoo forum back when it was alive with activity and there was an almost daily influx of interesting recommendations and opinions.

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    7. I liked all four of them to one degree or another. But No Coffin for the Corpse was more straightforward and had a clever, relatively plausible solution.

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  4. It is available in kindle at Amazon.

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  5. Detectives with insufferable egos are not really my cup of tea but have heard a lot abt this series so will give it a try, if I get the books.

    Happy Easter, John.

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  6. I don't like Clayton Rawson. I find his books too gimmicky, too convoluted, too exhausting.

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  7. John, I just am testing to see if this gets through, as I'm on a different computer. - Rick

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  8. I remember liking The Footprints on the Ceiling, but No Coffin for the Corpse is neither Rawson's best or his most straightforward mystery novel.

    No Coffin for the Corpse is suspiciously pulpy in nature and suspects its an expensive rewrite of the unpublished Don Diavolo novella, "Murder from the Grave," which was scheduled to appear in a 1941 issue of Red Star Mystery. A year later No Coffin for the Corpse was published. So you can almost see the padding needed to make the pulp-style plot more palpable to the readers of the more traditional detective novels, but the result was atrocious and hated the solution. Just imagine Carr pulling that gag with The Judas Window. Even we would have crucified him for that!

    By the way, did you get my reply to your email?

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