Sleight of Crime: Fifteen Classic Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Magic Review

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Sleight of Crime: Fifteen Classic Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Magic ReviewSLEIGHT OF CRIME (1977), edited by Cedric E. Clute, Jr. (manager of a nightclub devoted to magic shows), and Nicholas Lewin (specialist in comedy magic), contains these 15 short pieces: (1) "The Conjurer's Revenge" by Stephen Leacock; (2) "From Another World" by Clayton Rawson; (3) "The Episode of the Mexican Seer" by Grant Allen; (4) "A Trick or Two" by John Novotny; (5) "Lammas Night" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro; (6) "The Man of Mysteries" by Walter B. Gibson; (7) "Death by Black Magic" by Joseph Commings; (8) "The Adventure of the Hanging Acrobat" by Ellery Queen; (9) "Murder among Magicians" by Manly Wade Wellman; (10) "The Green-and-Gold String" by Philip MacDonald; (11) "Professor Swankton's Ruse" by George Johnson; (12) "The Florentine Masks" by Walter B. Gibson; (13) "The Weapon from Nowhere" by Conway Lonstar (a pen name of Norma Schier); (14) "The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey" by Dorothy L. Sayers; and (15) "A Model Dialogue" by Stephen Leacock.
Only Novotny's humorous Premise Story (What If--Everyone Had ONE Magic Ability?) is concerned with "real" magic; all the rest involve (in a great variety of ways) people who perform magic tricks or pretend to be psychics. Six of these works are basically Fair-Play Puzzles which readers can test their wits with; five more of them are Good-Fortune Adventures, where a character successfully achieves what she or he wanted to do; one is an unbelievable Heroic Fantasy involving an "incredible" rescue; and two are virtually How-to-Do-It stories that teach readers a few fairly clever tricks.
Technically, Grant Allen's piece is a chapter from his episodic didactic novel AN AFRICAN MILLIONAIRE (1897), and Norma Schier's Good-Fortune Adventure is also a clever parody of Clayton Rawson's Great Merlini stories (notice that "Conway Lonstar" is an anagram of "Clayton Rawson").
If you are a huge fan of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, you might enjoy the story included here. However, in my judgment, it is one of her all-time weakest works, and I rated it considerably below the other 14 pieces in this anthology. To close on a positive note, my three favorites are Rawson's "From Another World" (an excellent Puzzle Story), Yarbro's "Lammas Night" (a Good-Fortune Adventure about the historical Count Cagliostro in Paris), and Stephen Leacock's "A Model Dialogue" (a hilarious How-to-Do-It).Sleight of Crime: Fifteen Classic Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Magic Overview

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