Footprints on the Ceiling

Clayton Rawson (1906–1971) was a novelist, editor, and magician. He is best known for creating the Great Merlini, an illusionist and amateur sleuth introduced in Death from a Top Hat (1938). Rawson followed the character through three more novels, concluding the series with No Coffin for the Corpse (1942). In 1941 and 1943 he published the short-story collections Death out of Thin Air and Death from Nowhere, starring Don Diavolo, an escape artist introduced in the Merlini series.

Tom Mead is a UK mystery writer and aficionado of Golden Age crime fiction. His novels in the award-winning Joseph Spector Locked-Room Mystery series include Death and the Conjuror, The Murder Wheel, Cabaret Macabre, The House at Devil’s Neck, and So Speak the Dead. He has also published a collection of impossible crime short stories, The Indian Rope Trick (and Other Violent Entertainments), and co-edited (with Gigi Pandian) an anthology, All the Crime in the World: Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Puzzles from Across the Globe. His works have been translated into fifteen languages (and counting) and named books of the year by The Guardian, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, CrimeFictionLover, and CrimeReads. Death and the Conjuror is currently in development for screen adaptation.