THE GREAT MERLINI “The Transparent Man.” Syndicated by United Artist Television, 1951. G&W Television Production Inc. Cast: Jerome Thor as the Great Merlini, Barbara Cook as Julie, Robert Noe as Inspector Gavigan, Howard Smith as Belmont, E.G. Marshall as Comell and Michaele Myers as Josephine. Original Story and Adapted by Clayton Rawson. Produced by Felix Greenfield and Robert Whiteman. Filmed at Fletcher Smith Studio, New York. Directed by Ted Post.

   Question, who was the first Fictional Magician Detective to appear on television? Really, if you know tell me.

   It may be the Great Merlini who made his TV debut in the episode “The Great Merlini” for the NBC-TV series CAMEO THEATRE (May 23, 1950). The thirty-minute anthology series featured plays performed live in the round. Chester Morris (film’s Boston Blackie) was the Great Merlini. From the plot as described and with author Clayton Rawson credited as one of the writers, the episode was probably an adaption of Rawson’s book FOOTPRINTS ON THE CEILING.

   As far as I know, no copy of this episode of CAMEO THEATRE exists. However the second and maybe the last TV appearance of the Great Merlini is available to watch. A pilot film for a proposed TV series THE GREAT MERLINI, the episode was entitled “The Transparent Man” and was written by Clayton Rawson.

   Created by Rawson for a series of books and short stories, the first, DEATH FROM A TOP HAT, was published in 1938. Two movies were adapted from the books, MIRACLES FOR SALE (1939; directed by Tod Browning, based on DEATH FROM A TOP HAT) and Michael Shayne film THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T DIE (1942) starring Lloyd Nolan based on the book NO COFFIN FOR THE CORPSE.

   Clayton Rawson is considered one of the greatest writers of locked room mysteries and includes John Dickson Carr and Fred Dannay among his greatest fans. He would help found the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and served for many year as managing editor for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (1963-71).

“The Transparent Man.” When a famous thief announces his plans to steal a priceless necklace, it is a crime for the police, but when the thief has been dead since 1798 it becomes a job for The Great Merlini. He must solve how an invisible thief opened a locked door and stole the necklace from a room full of people.

   For TV viewers “The Transparent Man” is an entertaining but flawed TV show, however fans of the books may find this TV episode disappointing. It is more an “impossible crime” story than a locked room mystery.

   Rawson’s books and short stories even today are considered among the best of the locked mystery genre. Arguably the greatest flaw in Rawson’s books is the slow pace and the enormous amount of pages it takes to develop the locked room mystery. With time limited the TV version settled on a weak solution, faster pace, and more attention to the character Great Merlini.

   Jerome Thor (FOREIGN INTRIGUE) played the Great Merlini with the confident flare one expects from a stage magician. The eccentric Merlini enjoys the challenge of solving impossible mysteries, and he is amused that his talent to deal with crime is in more demand than his stage act as a magician. There is no mention of owning a magic store.

   Ross Harte, the Watson to the Great Merlini, was not in the TV pilot. Replacing him was Julie, Merlini’s talented Magician’s Assistant girlfriend with a wry wit. Barbara Cook played the role well, so it is a surprise that the IMDb claim this was her only role in television or film.

   Director Ted Post would go on to a long successful career directing a variety of TV series including PERRY MASON, GUNSMOKE, TWILIGHT ZONE, and COLUMBO. He also directed films such as BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES and MAGNUM FORCE.

   But this was one of his first attempts at directing television and it shows. The direction here is awkward, a clumsy mix of close-ups and medium shots with a missed shot or so. But much of the awkwardness could have been covered with a background soundtrack.

   Robert Noe captured the essence of Inspector Gavigan. The suspects included two actors still remembered today. Howard Smith, who had a successful career from vaudeville to films and may be best remembered for his TV work (HAZEL), looked uncomfortable and lost. E. G. Marshall, a successful actor on Broadway and film (12 ANGRY MEN) is also best remembered for his work in TV (THE DEFENDERS), did only an adequate job with his small role.

   Felix Greenfield and Robert Whiteman produced this pilot for a GREAT MERLINI TV series. I can find nothing about Robert Whiteman, but Felix Greenfield was best remembered as a publicist for Warner Brothers for over 30 years.

   Greenfield was also a stage magician (mentalist) who starred in his own radio shows in New York during the 40s. His only other TV producer credit in IMDb was for the “Great Merlini” episode of CAMEO THEATRE, but according to his obit in the New York Times, he also was a technical consultant on magic for several TV series including THE DEFENDERS.

   This show was filmed in 1951 and near the end of the wild days of television. The networks were still young. NBC and DuMont began in 1946 and CBS and ABC would join in 1948. Independent TV stations many doing their own programming were growing all over the country and everyone needed programs to fill the time.

   How crazy and forgotten was that time for television? Wikipedia does not even mention United Artist Television existed between 1948 and 1952 instead claiming it began in 1958.

   From Broadcast (March 19, 1951) UA’s TV Director John Mitchell announced, “United Artist Television, New York has been appointed national distributer of the GREAT MERLINI, new half-hour TV film series produced by G&W Productions and filmed at Fletcher Smith Studios, New York. Ted Post of CBS is director of the show. The program is to be distributed on the basis of local and regional sponsorships.”

   John Mitchell was an early pioneer of television in how companies marketed TV programs to early television stations and networks. In 1952 he became one of the first three employees of Screen Gems.

   Among the joys of watching old television shows are the many stories and questions behind the making of the program. Is the Great Merlini TV’s first Magician/Detective? Where did this attempt for a GREAT MERLINI TV series air? Why couldn’t I find an American TV series to feature a Magician/Detective before THE MAGICIAN (CBS, 1973-74)? And was “Transparent Man” the last TV appearance of the Great Merlini?

BONUS FROM YOUTUBE:

Clayton Rawson as the Great Merlini performing the “Floating Lady” trick with family and friends.

   Suppose all the readers of this column were gathered together in one room. At the front, standing before the lectern or podium or whatever the hell you call it, I pose a question: Any of you know something about Tom Everitt? Almost everyone in the room would probably answer: “Tom Whoveritt?” Perhaps one or two who had read my book THE ART OF DETECTION and were blessed with a photographic memory might say: “Wasn’t he the guy who provided the plots for Manny Lee to turn into Ellery Queen radio scripts after Fred Dannay dropped out and before Anthony Boucher came aboard?”

   Indeed he was. But aside from that fact, and the titles of more than thirty EQ scripts that were based on Everitt plot synopses, virtually nothing is known of him. While working on THE ART OF DETECTION I had ransacked the Web looking for a little more information about this mystery man but with no luck. Then out of the blue not long ago I received an email from a total stranger who, in the course of researching something else entirely, had unearthed more information about Everitt than I could have used even had I known of it in time to put it in the book. But there’s no reason I can’t summarize it here. Thank you, Jonathan Guss, for making this month’s column possible.

   John Thompson Everitt, whom I’ll call JT just to make things simple, was born in Yonkers, New York on December 11, 1908. His ancestors had arrived in Massachusetts by 1643 and had settled in the New York City area near Jamaica by 1650. JT’s father, Charles Percy Everitt (1873-1951), was a well-known rare book dealer, and Charles’ brother Samuel Alexander Everitt (1871-1953) was a partner in the Doubleday publishing house until his retirement in 1930. JT’s older brother Charles Raymond Everitt (1901-1947) also went into the publishing business, working at Harcourt Brace and later, until his early death, at Little Brown, the publisher of a volume of memoirs by his and JT’s father (THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER: A RARE BOOKMAN IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN HISTORY, 1951).

   In 1930 JT graduated from Yale, where he was known as a soccer player. A year later he was hired by the CBS radio network to write for its March of Time program. By 1940 he had moved into the advertising side of radio at the Young & Rubicam agency where, among many other jobs, he was tasked with handling a prospectus from the NBC radio network on The Green Hornet, for which NBC was seeking a sponsor. Apparently he was still working at that agency when he became involved with the Ellery Queen series.

   Since its debut in June of 1939, every one of the scripts for the series had been written by Manfred B. Lee based on plot synopses prepared by his cousin and EQ collaborator Fred Dannay. (More precisely, every one except “The Dauphin’s Doll,” first broadcast around Christmastime 1943 and written by Manny alone.) Early in 1944 Fred’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. The burdens of taking care of two young children, plus editing a large annual anthology of short mystery fiction and running Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), which had been launched in the fall of 1941, soon made it impossible for Fred to continue coming up with a plot a week for the radio series.

   He was several synopses ahead when he dropped out, and Manny squirreled these away for use in emergencies, relying most of the time on recycling earlier scripts under new titles and condensing 60-minute scripts from the show’s first season (1939-40) into its current half-hour format. But these ploys couldn’t go on indefinitely. Somebody had to be found to take over Fred’s function.

   How TJ came into the picture remains unknown. Possibly it was through his older brother Charles, who was working at Little Brown, publisher of the Queen novels and anthologies since 1942. Perhaps it was due to the connections Fred and Manny had retained with the advertising and publicity businesses where they’d gotten their start. Whether he was the first man brought in to assume Fred’s function as plot provider remains unclear.

   We don’t know exactly how many Dannay synopses Manny had in reserve, but several of the episodes dating from late 1944 strike me as too outrageous to have stemmed from Fred. Take, for example, “Cleopatra’s Snake” (October 12 & 14, 1944). As backstage observer of a live production of Antony and Cleopatra for experimental TV, Ellery becomes a key witness when the genuine poisonous snake being used in the death scene (yeah, right) bites to death the actress playing Cleopatra.

   Now let’s consider “The Glass Sword” (November 30 & December 2, 1944), in which Ellery tackles the case of the circus sword swallower who died when the sword in his stomach broke while the lights were out. Was it Everitt who cranked out the synopses that Manny turned into these scripts? Was it another Dannay substitute? Or, wacko though they are, could they have originated with Fred after all? For more information, keep reading.

   The earliest EQ script that we know came from a synopsis by Everitt was “The Diamond Fence” (January 24, 1945), which involves the murder of a middleman for stolen gems and the disappearance of five diamond rings from the scene of the crime under impossible circumstances. A substantial excerpt from this episode survives on audio as a “sneak preview” from the Armed Forces Radio Service.

   From that point at least through the end of March, every script Manny wrote was based on Everitt material. It was during these early months of the last full year of World War II that Manny enlisted Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) to take over Everitt’s function. It was an ideal choice. Boucher had already published seven novels in the Queen vein and had had short stories published in EQMM. Also, as we know from comments in various of his mystery reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle, he was an enthusiastic fan of the radio series.

   Since Tony lived in Berkeley, California and Manny on the east coast, collaboration on EQ radio scripts required vast correspondence between the two. This correspondence, archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, documents their work together in microscopic detail. The only aspect of it that concerns us here is Manny’s continual snarky remarks about Everitt, of which I’ll quote a few.

   On May 3, 1945, about six weeks before the broadcast of the first Boucher-Lee collaboration, Manny tells Tony that he’s “washed up” with Everitt, who “will do four more for us, and then he’s through. This by mutual agreement.” On the 17th of the same month, he says: “We want to avoid some of the weaknesses resulting from our present man’s so-called efforts….” And on the 24th he lets Tony know how he really feels about Everitt: “….At the end of our association with our ‘man,’ as I like to call him—hating his smug, treacherous guts as I do!—we’re finding more trouble…and sloppier submissions on his part even than usual….”

   On January 24, 1946, he describes one of the Everitt synopses he had to deal with as “a bad outline which I bought only because I was desperate …and bought and paid for it with the mental reservation that I’d probably have to do a thorough re-working job on it. I was a noble prophet.”

   But, simply because the EQ radio formula was so complex and demanding and Boucher with all his other commitments couldn’t conjure up a new plot synopsis on a weekly basis, Manny was forced to make further commitments to Everitt. “This was a desperation move,” he tells Boucher on October 30, 1946, “as his stuff always gives me headaches, but good….I had to do something in self-protection. I heartily wish now I hadn’t made that commitment…. But it can’t be undone and I can only hope that he doesn’t come through, so that I can order more from you.”

   Almost a year later Manny is still reluctantly dealing with Everitt now and then and, in a letter to Fred Dannay dated November 4, 1947, griping about it just as loudly. Discussing the possibility of repeating some of the scripts based on Everitt synopses, he describes Everitt as “such a son-of-a-bitch that, even though our rights to repeat the material without payment are clear, he would raise a considerable stink in the business if we didn’t pay him an extra fee….[F]or the most part he got tremendously overpaid in the original payment—the bulk of the creative work was done by me, out of sheer necessity.”

   If Manny were to offer a token fee of perhaps $50 per episode recycled, Everitt “would start haggling and chiseling and his tongue would wag plenty in the business….” What business Manny is referring to becomes clear later in the same letter. “[Y]ou don’t know…what that bastard has been saying and is still saying in the advertising business about his ‘part’ in the Queen show. There is no protection against his kind of conscienceless and unscrupulously shrewd self-propaganda….”

   As his correspondence with both Fred and Boucher demonstrates, at least during the radio years Manny was a Type A personality with a genius for getting hot under the collar, and the insane pressure of putting out a program every week probably shortened his life.

   Whether he was being too harsh on JT is hard to judge. One of the few living persons to have seen any of the Everitt material Manny turned into scripts is Ted Hertel, who helped choose the scripts included in THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (2005). In connection with that project he was erroneously sent the synopses for “The Right End” and “The Glass Sword,” both with Everitt’s name on them.

   To judge by Ted’s comments, what Everitt gave Manny to work with was just as bad as Manny said it was. In an email to me he described the synopses as “so poorly written, so amateurish, that they could not possibly have been the work of Manny in any form.” (The scripts Manny based on these synopses were broadcast respectively on November 16 and 30, 1944.)

   Only one episode Manny based on an Everitt synopsis is available on audio. In “Number 31″ (September 7, 1947) Ellery tries to crack the secret of international mystery man George Arcaris’s success at smuggling diamonds into the Port of New York and to comfort a wonderfully dignified black woman by solving the murder of her son, the servant for a wealthy man-about-town. The cases seem unconnected until Ellery discovers the number 31 popping up in both.

   It’s an excellent episode, but how much credit should go to Everitt remains a mystery since no one in the last 70 years has seen his synopsis. I wouldn’t be surprised if the black woman was entirely the creation of the staunchly liberal Manny Lee.

   To the best of my knowledge the only Everitt radio work besides his EQ plots was a single script for The Shadow. In “The Creature That Kills” (January 6, 1946) Lamont Cranston, alias The Shadow, investigates the theft of priceless papers from the 20th-floor laboratory of a brilliant young scientist under impossible circumstances.

   It turns out that the thief, a master criminal with a Sydney Greenstreet voice, had an accomplice in the form of a trained 27-foot python which slid down the side of the building from the window directly above the scientist’s lab, got hold of the papers, then slid back up the wall to its master. What a snake! Do I detect here the same kind of wackiosity that pervades the EQ scripts about Cleopatra and the glass sword?

   In 1947 Everitt returned to radio full-time as Eastern program manager for the ABC network. We don’t know if he wrote any more for the medium, but Jonathan Guss mentions one script he contributed to the golden age of live TV drama, “Revenge by Proxy” (Colgate Theatre, May 14, 1950). The cast included Nancy Coleman, Phil Arthur, Bernard Kates and Victor Sutherland. As chance would have it, the following week’s drama, “Change of Murder,” was based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich.

   Everitt died on November 2, 1954, at age 45. Today he seems to be totally forgotten, perhaps deservedly so. The most that can be claimed for him is that he figures as a footnote in the Ellery Queen story. But at least now that footnote has been written.

GEORGE BAGBY – The Golden Creep. George Bagby/Inspector Schmidt #48. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1982. Detective Book Club, hardcover, 3-in-1 edition. No paperback edition.

   At one time in my life, I think you could say that Aaron Marc Stein (aka George Bagby) was my favorite mystery writer. Emphasis on writer. He had a fluid, smooth style of putting words on paper that I’ve never been able to describe to my own satisfaction, much less anyone else’s, and his dialogue may have been even better. When two people are having conversations in his books, you always know who’s speaking, even when all you have are the words they are saying to judge by.

   There were 49 books in his George Bagby series — Bagby is the fellow who tags along with New York City police inspector Schmidt on his many many cases– and this one is number 48, and I don’t even remember seeing the title before. Stein was in his late 70s when he wrote it, and while the writing is as good as ever, the plot itself is one of his weaker ones.

   It starts out in semi-salacious fashion, with Bagby visiting a girlie joint on his own and ending up in an alley behind the place afterward next to a dead body. The dead man is the character the book is titled after — he made himself rather obnoxious with the Amazonian-built girls who are the main attraction — referred to, surprisingly, as “tit elation” — and Bagby, having been slipped a mickey, as he supposes, is the main suspect.

   And Inspector Schmidt — I don’t know if he ever had a first name — has to play it carefully, as the press knows full well how close the two of them are. But rather than concentrate on the doings leading up to the murder, the two of them focus instead on the murder weapon — the tail of a huge stone dragon that someone carted to the roof of the place and dropped down on the dead man.

   You have the feeling that when the appropriate number of pages have gone by, Stein/Bagby decided it was time to close things up and get back to the people in and around the strip joing itself, and sure enough, that’s all it takes to solve the case.

   I found the book enjoyable, but if you aren’t a fan of Bagby’s from before, or worse yet, you’ve never heard of him, this one won’t be the one to convince you that you ought to read more of him.

  BORDEN CHASE – Diamonds of Death. Hart, paperback original, 1947. First serialized as “Blue-White and Perfect,” Argosy, 18 Sept-23 Oct, 1937. Filmed as Blue, White and Perfect, 1941.

   A while back, I read and reviewed Borden Chase’s novel Red River and found it surprisingly hammy from a writer known for his laconic screenplays. So I decided to give him another try and fished out Diamonds of Death, the first novel edition of Chase’s pulp novelette, “Blue-White and Perfect.”

   This is that rarity, a dumb mystery that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence. The “surprise” criminal may be obvious early on, but Chase speeds his story through so many curves one hasn’t time to carp, as hero Smooth Kyle (I guess some folks don’t care what they name their kids) chases diamond smugglers from Broadway to Havana and back again.

   Chase provides his hero with a wise-cracking girlfriend, buddies in the Customs Office, and enough bad guys to felonize a dozen books like this, ranging from cheap hoods to smooth operators, phony dowagers, fake cops… I could go on, but readers of this sort of thing have met them before, and those who haven’t probably couldn’t appreciate the pulpy splendor of the piece, as Chase fills his story with glittering diamonds, luxury liners, exploding airplanes and elegant mansions, all of which impart a feel of extravagance without actually costing anything to write about.

   I’ll just add that the original pulp novel was bought by Fox for their “Michael Shayne” series back in the 40s, movies notable for pace, casting, and for the fact that the producers used only one Mike Shayne novel in the whole series, apparently preferring to impose their hero into stories by other authors, including Clayton Rawson, Frederick Nebel and even Raymond Chandler!

   Anyway, Borden Chase’s story suits the character quite well, and reading this one can almost hear Lloyd Nolan’s snappy banter as he stalks through the studio back lot.