Till Death Do Us Part

"I'll bet this is the first time anyone's been buried twice in the same grave."

"Batman: Lord Death Man"

Okay, I'll admit, I'm writing this review almost two months after I read the book. So, yes, the details are a bit vague, and yes, I have little interesting to say about this book.

Ross Harte, PR-man, author and journalist, has made an enemy in millionaire Dudley Wolff, by exposing a scandal that even has the Senate interested and luck has it that the girl he intends to marry happens to be Kathryn Wolff. Dudley uses every trick in the book to make sure Ross won't marry Kathryn. Despite these machinations however, Dudley does not lose sight of his primary goal in life: to examine death, and more importantly, figure a way to postpone the inevitable. He's open to everything, which is why he finances both an experimental biologist who tries to cheat death in a scientific manner, and spirit mediums who attempt the job in a supernatural way. Lately however, some odd incidents have been happening in the house and renowned stage magician The Great Merlini is asked to make sense out of it all (and it just so happens Ross is Merlini's assistant...). The mystery involves a man who has apparently will not stay dead and can appear and disappear from rooms at will, a spirit photograph, the murder on Dudley, a disappearing murder weapon and even an attempt on Ross' life. It's up the Great Merlini to explain the trickery behind all this magic in Clayton Rawson's No Coffin for the Corpse (1942).

I have reviewed Rawson's The Footprints on the Ceiling and The Headless Lady earlier this year (and the short stories in 2015), but No Coffin for the Corpse is the final novel of The Great Merlini series (I have not reviewed the first novel, Death from a Top Hat and don't know if I will because I already saw the film many years back). The basics of No Coffin for the Corpse are very similar to other The Great Merlini stories, with Merlini being asked to determine whether an ostensibly supernatural phenomenon is in fact supernatural, or just a result of human trickery (and often, the supernatural option is preferred). There's an abundance of suspicious characters like pseudo-scientists, mediums and of course parlor magicians who of course also act as suspiciously as possible, and Rawson is sure to use his own background as a stage magician to come up with all kinds of little events and set pieces to entertain the reader.

But I can't help but feel that No Coffin for the Corpse is kinda underwhelming. The main plot, which revolves around the 'man who can't die' and the trickery he performs, including a disappearing weapon, does make up for a tale that manages to pique the reader's interest, and Rawson certainly is able to constantly add new events to keep the tension up. However, ultimately most of the tricks played by the culprit are extremely obvious to see through, exactly because Rawson uses magic tricks and other concepts from the business to create his mystery plots. Of course, that's what he always does, but this time the smokescreen is far too thin. The part with the disappearing murder weapon is signalled far too obviously, especially combined with the crude clewing in this novel and even then, it's not even signalled well, because the logical chain still expects you to make a jump yourself that is founded on nothing but a baseless guess ("character X can probably do action Y that is needed to accomplish act Z, because that would solve the mystery in a clean way"). The mystery of the man who won't die is another of those tricks which might've worked better in any other book, but in a Rawson book, in a novel that is filled with spirit mediums, circus artists and more of those performance artists, it's far too easy to guess what's going on, and there's not much of a mystery, and the mystery that is here, doesn't feel really satisfying, as at times, it almost feels like Rawson's just saying "Oh, and by the way, they know a magic trick so they could definitely do that."

That said, I liked a second, minor murder in the latter half of the novel much better. Merlini has to determine whether a car accident was indeed just an accident, but the clewing here is really good and this super-short part is far better plotted as a mystery I think that most of the rest of the book.

Like I mentioned in the introduction, this has been a rather short review, though I don't think I'd have been able to write much about No Coffin for the Corpse even if I had written this post right after reading the book. Perhaps I shouldn't have read these books relatively close to each other (yes, 'months' is relatively close in my reading diet), but I found No Coffin for the Corpse simply underwhelming, with tricks and ideas that seemed rather obvious, especially if you know you're reading a Great Merlini novel with a certain type of setting and characters. Had the clewing been better, I might've been more impressed, but that too was not exceptionally inspired.