Clayton Rawson

This page incorporated content from Clayton Rawson, a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Clayton Rawson (1906 - March 2, 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."

Books

• Scarne on Dice (1945) (with John Scarne)
• Al Baker's Pet Secrets (1951) (with Albert Baker)
• How to Entertain Children with Magic You Can Do (1963) (as The Great Merlini)
• The Golden Book of Magic: Amazing Tricks for Young Magicians (1964) (as The Great Merlini)