Death from a Top Hat
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- 7,99 zł
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- 7,99 zł
Publisher Description
A magician turned detective is caught up in the most baffling locked-room murder mystery...
'One of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries' Publishers Weekly starred review
'Dazzling' Saturday Review
'A cornerstone of detective fiction' New York Times
Master magician The Great Merlini has hung up his top hat and white gloves, and now spends his days running a magic shop in New York and his nights moonlighting as a consultant for the NYPD. When the crimes seem impossible, it is his magician's mind they need.
So when two occultists are discovered dead in locked rooms, one spread out on a pentagram, both appearing to have been murdered under similar circumstances, Merlini is immediately called in. The list of suspects includes an escape artist, a professional medium, and a ventriloquist - and it is only too clear that this is a world Merlini knows rather too well...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1938, this reissue in Otto Penzler's American Mystery Classics series from Rawson (1906 1971) introduces the Great Merlini, the owner of Miracles for Sale, a Manhattan magic shop. Merlini's mastery of misdirection enables him to assist his friend with the NYPD, Insp. Homer Gavigan, who has two bizarre murder cases to solve. In one, anthropologist Cesare Sabbat was found on a pentagram in a locked room all of whose keyholes were stuffed with cloth on the inside. Around the pentagram were written the names of various deities and demons, including that of Surgat, "who opens all locks." The second case is quite similar. Rawson bends over backward to play fair with the reader. He not only leaves relevant clues in plain sight but at the start focuses the reader's attention on the essential questions: "what it was that all suspects had in common" and "what the two things were that one of them was able to do that no one else could possibly have done." This is one of the all-time greatest impossible murder mysteries.
