Escapology is the practice of escaping from restraints or other traps. Escapologists escape from handcuffs, straitjackets, cages, coffins, steel boxes, barrels, bags, burning buildings, fish-tanks, and other perils, often in combination.
Clayton Rawson was an American mystery writer, editor, and amateur magician. His four novels frequently invoke his great knowledge of stage magic and feature as their fictional detective The Great Merlini, a professional magician who runs a shop selling magic supplies. He also wrote four short stories in 1940 about a stage magician named Don Diavolo, who appears as a minor character in one of the novels featuring The Great Merlini. "Don Diavolo is a magician who perfects his tricks in a Greenwich Village basement where he is frequently visited by the harried Inspector Church of Homicide, either to arrest the Don for an impossible crime or to ask him to solve it."
Death from a Top Hat (1938) is a locked-room mystery novel written by Clayton Rawson. It is the first of four mysteries featuring The Great Merlini, a stage magician and Rawson's favorite protagonist.
The Great Merlini is a fictional detective created by Clayton Rawson. He is a professional magician and amateur detective, who appears in four locked room or impossible crime novels written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as in a dozen short stories.
Walter Brown Gibson was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. He authored several novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile series of the 1960s. He was married to Litzka R. Gibson, also a writer, and the couple lived in New York state.
Florence Davenport Rice was an American film actress.
Michael William Kaluta, sometimes credited as Mike Kaluta or Michael Wm. Kaluta, is an American comics artist and writer best known for his acclaimed 1970s adaptation of the pulp magazine hero The Shadow with writer Dennis O'Neil. He is the godfather of comedian and gamemaster Brennan Lee Mulligan.
Sally Blane was an American actress who appeared in more than 100 movies.
John Beach Litel was an American film and television actor.
Swing Hostess is a 1944 American musical comedy film directed by Sam Newfield for Producers Releasing Corporation and starring Martha Tilton, Iris Adrian, Charles Collins, Betty Brodel, Cliff Nazarro and Harry Holman. The film's sets were designed by the art director Paul Palmentola.
John Farrell MacDonald was an American character actor and director. He played supporting roles and occasional leads. He appeared in over 325 films over a four-decade career from 1911 to 1951, and directed forty-four silent films from 1912 to 1917.
Craig Rice was an American writer of mystery novels and short stories, described by book critic Bill Ruehlmann as "the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction, she wrote the binge and lived the hangover."
The Footprints on the Ceiling (1939) is a locked-room mystery novel written by Clayton Rawson.
Michael "Mike" Shayne is a fictional private detective character created during the late 1930s by writer Brett Halliday, a pseudonym of Davis Dresser. The character appeared in a series of seven films starring Lloyd Nolan for Twentieth Century Fox, five films from the low-budget Producers Releasing Corporation with Hugh Beaumont, a radio series under a variety of titles between 1944 and 1953, and later in 1960–1961 in a 32-episode NBC television series starring Richard Denning in the title role.
Charles Fulton Oursler Sr. was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an author of mysteries and detective fiction. His son was the journalist and author Will Oursler (1913–1985).
Fast Company is a 1938 American mystery film directed by Edward Buzzell and starring Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice as married rare-book dealers who try to solve a murder case. It is based on the novel of the same name by Marco Page. It was followed by two 1939 films featuring the fictional couple, Fast and Loose and Fast and Furious, although different actors played the leads in each of the three films. To avoid confusion with a 1953 MGM film of the same title, Fast Company was retitled Rare Book Murder for television.
Charlie Chan in Honolulu is a 1939 American mystery film directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, starring Sidney Toler as the fictional Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan. The film is the first appearance of both Toler as Chan and Victor Sen Yung as "number two son" Jimmy.
David L. Snell was a pianist, conductor, composer and music director. He composed the music for over 170 shorts, series or feature films.
Virginia Sale was an American character actress whose career spanned six decades, during most of which she played older women, even when she was in her twenties. Over the 46 years she was active as an actress, she worked in films, stage, radio and television. She was famous for her one-woman stage show, Americana Sketches, which she did for more than 1,000 performances during a 15-year span.
