Death out of thin air

by Clayton Rawson (writing as Stuart Towne).

In two short novels from the 1940s, professional magician Don Diavolo gets mixed up in a couple of homicide cases where his experience in creating seemingly impossible effects for the stage works to his advantage in debunking apparently supernatural causes for (in "Ghost of the Undead") the death of a woman in his dressing room at the theater, evidently by vampire bite, and (in "Death Out of Thin Air") the murder of a police detective in his office at headquarters and a number of highly publicized thefts by an invisible man.

Clayton Rawson was himself a magician, and also wrote mystery novels featuring the Great Merlini, another professional illusionist who also ran a magic shop; I'm told that Don Diavolo appears in one of the Merlini novels, and a character in one of the Don Diavolo stories mentions that Merlini's store ships mail orders to India with all the instructions carefully translated into Hindustani.  The Don Diavolo stories all originally appeared in the pulp magazine called Red Star Mystery; the other two ("Claws of Satan" and "The Enchanted Dagger") are collected under the title Death from Nowhere.

These and five Merlini books have all been released as ebooks from Open Road Media; I stumbled across them in the OverDrive catalog of downloadable ebooks available from the library where I work, which I think is all kinds of cool, not only that these are available but that somebody in my library consortium bought them for our collection.  To be honest, if a new paperback reprint of pulp stories from the 1940s came out, we probably wouldn't buy a copy for the shelf, so it's grand that somebody took a chance on them in electronic form.

This was my first exposure to Don Diavolo.  I read them and dutifully trotted off to Shelfari to log them and was a little startled to see that I am the only Shelfari user to have done so!  I read the Merlini novels years ago; I forget which library had them, if it was a college library or a public library. But I think it may be time to read them again.

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson meet Mulder and Scully.  Jules de Grandin, physician and consultant for the Sûreté, has also been described as the occult Hercule Poirot, but I don't much care for Poirot myself so I'm going with the supernatural Sherlock instead.  The Watson in this series of short stories by Seabury Quinn, published in Weird Tales beginning in 1925, is also a doctor, a New Jersey GP named Trowbridge, though he narrates the tales with more of Scully's skepticism than Watson's admiration sometimes.
 And I had no idea these stories even existed until I read one of SF Signal's Mind Meld columns about a month ago, asking assorted authors for their recommendation of an underrated fantasy series.  It was S. Andrew Swann who recommended de Grandin, and his remark that Quinn is to gritty noir urban fantasy what Tolkien is to grand high-fantasy epic got my attention.  I'm a big fan of the Dresden Files, and I quite liked the X-Files when they weren't going overboard on the conspiracy (I liked the monster-of-the-week stories, so sue me), so of course I had to look up de Grandin.

Interlibrary loan is a wonderful invention, is all.  The de Grandin stories were collected in the 1970s, but those paperbacks are long out of print now; my library couldn't find a copy of the first one anywhere in my state, and had to borrow it from a much larger library system in Dallas for me.

The Adventures of Jules de Grandin collects the first seven stories, including the one that introduces the characters of de Grandin and Trowbridge and what would become the standard setting for the stories, the town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, possibly the epicenter of more weirdness than any town since Arkham, Mass. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, mad scientists, curses, it's all here, and de Grandin is just the man who knows how to deal with it all.

There were 93 de Grandin stories in all.  I'm tracking down the rest of them now.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

A lifelong drifter finds a reason to stay put for a while when he sees the gorgeous young wife of the man who offers him a mechanic's job.  She thinks he's pretty swell too.  But if they're going to be together they'll have to find a way to remove the only obstacle: her husband.

Let me admit up front that I have never seen the movie with Lana Turner.  I'll have to look it up now, and see how it's different from the book; a lot will depend on whether they made it before or after the institution of the Hayes Code, I reckon.

The book is pretty steamy, in that 1930s elliptical way.  The sex is not described, but you're left in no doubt what's going on.  There's nobody to like; the two principals are both pretty sleazy.  I guess that's the point.  But the book is so well written it kept me flipping pages.

Originally posted at MySpace, 3/25/06