Clayton Rawson

Clayton Rawson (August 15, 1906, Elyria, Ohio – March 1, 1971) was an American writer of mystery stories as well as a long-time editor and a prominent amateur magician. His four novels featuring a professional magician who calls himself The Great Merlini make use of Rawson's intimate knowledge of stage magic. All four Merlini novels, written in a brief four-year period towards the end of the Golden Age of Mysteries are intricately and ingenuously plotted and feature various kinds of locked room or impossible crimes. Rawson was a friend of both John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen, two somewhat more prominent writers of that era who also wrote stories involving seeming impossibilities, sometimes occult, that, in their dénouement have rational explanations. From 1963 to 1970 Rawson was the Managing Editor of ''Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'', the preeminent publication in the field. "...he belongs to a fondly remembered period of the past. He was not an important innovator, but rather a clever and quick-witted cultivator of the genre to which he devoted his career.

Sources

• Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, St. Martins Press, New York, 1980, ISBN 0-312-82417-3

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalogs