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Fiction in Magic & Conjuring

Who does not love a good story? Here you will find fascinating novels, plays, and other stories with some kind of magic nexus, for example, a magician as one of the characters, or perhaps the novel was written by a famous magician or magic author. You will also find locked room mysteries, the magic tricks of literature.

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Locked Room Mysteries

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Displaying 1 to 26 (of 26 products)

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Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace
The Tea-Leaf by Edgar Jepson & Robert Eustace

The death-causing method is ingenious. A lesson in applied science. It is such a fascinating method that the basic idea has subsequently been copied by other authors.

Two former friends, who had a falling out and now hate each other, meet in a Turkish bath. A verbal altercation ensues. One exits and goes to the shampoo room and the other is found dead. No weapon is found and the possibility to smuggle in and out a weapon has been ruled out by the available evidence. The living man, the apparent criminal, is charged with murder and it takes the genius of the victim's daughter to prove him...

$2.99
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L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace
The Mystery of the Circular Chamber by L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace

Strange deaths have occurred at the Castle Inn. In total three unexplained fatalities. The last death was the one of Archibald Wentworth. The well-to-do sleuth John Bell is investigating. Despite being strongly discouraged, Bell sleeps in the haunted chamber and thereby solves the supernatural mystery and explains it with science and common sense.

1st edition 1898, PDF 17 pages.

$2.99
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R. Austin Freeman
The Aluminum Dagger by R. Austin Freeman

Engineers will like the resolution of this locked room mystery. Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, a former medical doctor who became a forensic investigator of crimes, has to deal with murder behind locked doors. The only clue he has is an aluminum dagger shoved into the back of the victim.

One of the unique aspects of detective stories by R. Austin Freeman is that Freeman personally tested the methods described in his stories. The top floor of his house was a workshop and laboratory where he could try out and investigate sometimes arcane scientific knowledge from areas such as tropical medicine,...

$2.99
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Grace Sartwell Mason & John Northern Hilliard
The Bear's Claws by Grace Sartwell Mason & John Northern Hilliard

An exciting adventure and game of espionage featuring among others Judy Gray from New York, a typist who writes imaginary adventure novels in her spare time, John Savidge from Chicago, employed by the Eastern Securities Company to secretly survey and plan a trans-Persian railway, Serge Wolkonsky an agent of the Russian Secret Service, and Tom Jaggard from America, a magician who travels the Middle East under "The Great Jaggard, the World's Master Mage of Magic".

The backdrop is Persia at the beginning of the 20th century. All the powerful nations, first and foremost Russia, want to build...

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Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost Special by Arthur Conan Doyle

The word 'special' in the title refers to a special train - a privately hired train. This is a train a railway company inserts into its regular schedule when somebody pays for the expenses of the locomotive, wagons, and staff to operate the train. It is essentially the equivalent of chartering an airplane at a time when there were no airplanes.

This impossible crime story concerns the baffling disappearance of a special from the London and West Coast Railway Company on its journey from Liverpool to London on 3rd June 1890. Besides the train crew of driver, fireman, and train guard the only...

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Max Rittenberg
The Invisible Bullet by Max Rittenberg

... and four other Magnum, the science consultant, detective stories.

Each story has a scientific bend or aspect to it. Magnum is not the typical detective who takes on any interesting case. He only engages when there seems to be a scientific aspect to the case. He doesn't involve himself with the law or right or wrong. His primary interest is to figure out the modus operandi as a scientific consultant. Superbly eccentric, Magnum lives up the Thames at Plumstead Marshes and travels to his laboratories via a high-powered motor launch named "Fifi". He has a brilliant but intensely shy assistant,...

$4.99
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J. C. Cannell
100 Mysteries for Arm-Chair Detectives by J. C. Cannell

Based on actual crimes and mysteries investigated at Scotland Yard.

This is a fun read if you like short problems of deduction and observation. While most of them are not locked room problems, there are two of them in this collection, #34 and #88. One of them states that on an express train, a girl was found dead in a third-class compartment. Her head was badly injured. A violent blow had caused her death. The train had not stopped during the journey and the girl had occupied the compartment alone all the way.

Magicians will be able to solve some of the mysteries more easily because they...

$7.90
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Walter S. Masterman
The Wrong Letter by Walter S. Masterman

The crime: The Home Secretary Sir James Watson was found shot in the head inside his study which was locked from the inside. There was no apparent way in or out for the murderer to have been able to get into the room to commit the crime, nor a way to escape unnoticed. Further, the housekeeper Mrs. Simmons did not hear any shot which she certainly would have. What is going on here? How was the crime committed and by who?

It will be the task of Superintendent Sinclair from Scotland Yard and his amateur sleuth friend Sylvester Collins, a barrister, to unravel the mystery.

The inside cover...

$3.99
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Alan Thomas
The Death of Laurence Vining by Alan Thomas

An obscure masterpiece in the world of locked room mysteries with a meticulously planned-out crime that will delight the discerning detective story fan.

The original inside flap advert reads:

This brilliant first novel contains an original twist of plot that will be a tremendous relief to readers tired of the modern run of detective stories. They had found Laurence Vining, the famous criminologist, dead in the lift at the Hyde Park Tube station, a Malay kris buried in his back. The attendant swore no one had been in the lift with Vining. The skillful elaboration of incident and the...

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Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

Plot: While Holmes escapes boredom to a cocaine-induced haze sitting in his apartment on Baker Street, a beautiful but distressed young woman, Mary Morstan, asks for the help of Holmes and Watson. Her father vanished ten years ago. Starting six years ago she received every year from an anonymous benefactor a large precious pearl, totaling six pearls today. Now she received an invitation to meet the anonymous sender of pearls. It is an intriguing case that Holmes and Watson happily accept...

The most exciting scene of the novel is what could be called a 19th-century version of a high-speed...

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Arthur Conan Doyle
Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle

Just before Helen Stoner's twin sister Julia was about to get married she was murdered during the night in her own chambers which she habitually locked from inside before going to bed. Now Helen was recently engaged and she, too, fears that she may be about to be killed. Ms. Stoner is living with her stepfather Dr. Roylotts of Stoke Moran in the old half-abandoned ancestral country house. Watson and Holmes investigate ...

Arthur Conan Doyle considered this his best story. It is a classic locked room mystery with a clever method. It has been adapted for television, film, theatre, radio,...

$2.99
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Gaston Leroux
The Perfume of the Lady in Black by Gaston Leroux

This is the continuation of The Mystery of the Yellow Room with many of the main characters reappearing. The setting is even more fascinating in an old castle called The Fort of Hercules. Again we get a detailed map of the castle where the strange happenings occur to help us visualize the setting and situation. The novel explains and resolves some of the connections between the various characters leading to a stunning revelation.

  • CHAPTER I: Which Begins Where Most Romances End
  • CHAPTER II: In Which There Is Question Of The Changing Humors Of Joseph Rouletabille
  • CHAPTER III: The Perfume
  • CHAPTER IV: En Route; the Little...
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Gaston Leroux
The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux

From the author of the famous The Phantom of the Opera comes this detective story. While this is not the first locked room mystery, it is the first such novel that features a detailed floorplan illustrating the crime scene. This provides an additional layer of information for the reader to follow along and try to solve the mystery.

The protagonist is the amateur sleuth and reporter Joseph Rouletabille who is sent to investigate a criminal case at the Château du Glandier and takes along his friend the lawyer Sainclair, who narrates. (This is the successful detective fiction template created...

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Jacques Futrelle
The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle

The premise of this locked-room story is wonderful. The protagonist is Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen who is in a scientific debate with Dr. Charles Ransom and Alfred Fielding. Augustus, also known as "The Thinking Machine", claims that nothing is impossible when logic and clear thinking are applied. To prove his point, they conduct an experiment where Van Dusen is locked up in a prison for one week with the challenge to escape, which of course he does. But the real fun is in how he does it. It is a tour de force of logic and deductive thinking. Highly recommended to all locked room crime lovers. ...

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Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventure of the Empty House by Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle was the most famous and successful author in the detective story genre. One of the locked-room mysteries he wrote was The Adventure of the Empty House. The story plays in 1894, three years after Holmes's apparent death. Ronald Adair, son of the Earl of Maynooth, a colonial governor in Australia, was killed with a soft-nosed revolver bullet to his head while sitting in his room, working on accounts of some kind. The motive was not robbery since nothing was stolen. Adair's door was locked from the inside and the only window in the room presented a 20-foot drop with no sign...

$2.99
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Israel Zangwill
The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill

The Big Bow Mystery was one of the first locked-room mystery stories and the first full-length locked-room mystery. It is still one of the best with an ingenious solution. It has been used as the basis for three movies (The Perfect Crime (1928), The Crime Doctor (1934), The Verdict (1946)).

Set in London's East End, in Bow, a murder occurred inside a locked room, with no clear indication as to the weapon used, the perpetrator of the crime, or a possible escape route. Mrs. Drabdump, a widow who rents out rooms, panics when one of her lodgers does not respond to her attempts to wake him....

$4.99
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Edgar Allan Poe
Murders in the Rue Morge by Edgar Allan Poe

With Murders in the Rue Morge, Edgar Allan Poe is the inventor of the model for the modern detective story consisting of a brilliant detective, his personal friend who serves as the narrator, and the revelation of whodunit that is revealed before the explanation of how the crime was committed. More specifically, Poe is also the father of the locked room mystery, detective stories where the impossibility of the crime takes center stage. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged that he modeled his most famous Sherlock Holmes stories after Poe's detective story model by having Watson explicitly state in the first Holmes...

$3.99
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Stuart Cumberland
Marked for a Victim by Stuart Cumberland

A tale of modern black art. A thrilling story of love and mysticism.

In the Victorian age, spiritism and mysticism were big business. Therefore it is no surprise that a muscle reader like Stuart Cumberland tried to take advantage of it and wrote stories based on his experience as a 'thought reader'.

This story was also published under A Fatal Affinity: A Weird Story

1st edition 1889, 93 pages; PDF 116 pages.

$5
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Professor Hoffmann
Conjurer Dick by Professor Hoffmann

This is a lovely story of a boy wizard growing up to become a conjurer. While this is not autobiographical, Angelo Lewis clearly incorporated aspects of his own experience and life into this novel. For example, one of his teachers of card sleight-of-hand, M. Charlier, makes an appearance as Monsieur Ledoyen. This was the first book that had his pseudonym, Professor Hoffmann, as well as his real name, Angelo J. Lewis, on the cover.

Interesting for magicians is that every trick that features in this novel is explained. While the explanations are not very detailed, they are enough to reveal...

★★★★ $6
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Graham Hey
Let's Hear It For The Boy! by Graham Hey

A romantic-comedy novel about a failed magician.

"Poignant comedy genius at its best" - The Guardian

"The perfect summer tonic! Hilarious!" - Uri Geller

"Reading the hilarious story from the bus, where James unsuccessfully fights his biological urgency, I only narrowly escaped pissing myself from laughter." - Chris Wasshuber

When twenty-something James Valentine seeks refuge from the rain, the only shelter he can find is under the canopy of a fortune teller's dilapidated shed in Whitby. Madam Lulu invites him in and reveals that he's going to meet three women who will influence his life in ways...
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Professor Hoffmann
King Koko: A Conjuring Entertainment in the Form of a Fairy Tale by Professor Hoffmann

King Koko is a satirical performance piece, written for the stage by the one and only Professor Hoffmann.

Your audiences will love this amusing farce about a colorful King, his beautiful daughter, her fairy godmother, and the two suitors that are trying to win her hand in marriage. Along the way, 20 magical illusions are performed that add to the enchanting tale.

The effects are taught in Hoffmann's clear, concise style with twenty-seven illustrations.

From the Introduction by B.W. McCarron:

"The tale that you are about to experience has a charm and magic about it that is equal to that of a Disney...

$3
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Paul Voodini
The Curious Case of Jack the Ripper, Conan Doyle and Houdini by Paul Voodini

A gas-lamp mystery featuring Jack the Ripper, Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Cthulhu, Mina Crandon, Mary Jane Kelly, the Cottingley Fairies, and a cast of thousands!

"I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death," - Harry Houdini.

An exhilarating romp through Victorian London and 1920s Boston, as fact and fantasy are merged, moulded together, and then torn apart again all for your entertainment and delectation! By combining...

★★★★★ $4
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Henry Ridgely Evans
The House of the Sphinx by Henry Ridgely Evans

A novel involving love, mystery, magic and deception.

1st edition 1907, 1st digital edition 2013, 86 pages.

$5
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D. Angelo Ferri
Di Carini Investigations: The San Francisco Files 1935-1944 by D. Angelo Ferri

Many years ago at one of the first Tannen's Magic Conventions the author attended he met Walter Gibson. He knew many of the great magicians of the 30's and 40's personally including Harry Blackstone Sr. and he had a series of Detective Comic Books. He wrote books about magic and he created the masked crime fighter: The Shadow. D. Angelo Ferri used to listen to The Shadow on the radio when he was a kid. He also watched a lot of early TV shows inspired by those old radio programs, TV shows like Racket Squad, Dragnet, The Untouchables, and The Naked City.

Ferri loves to smoke cigars. One foggy night he was walking through the...

★★★★★ $6.95
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Bev Bergeron
The Magic Connection by Bev Bergeron

Romance and smuggling gold in the Far East, while witnessing the beginning of WWII. An old time adventure story based on true happenings and the telling of untold stories that happen before the World War II started. Join our master magician as he cons his magical way across the Orient out smarting the USA, British and Japanese Governments with a shipload of gold.

"I started to read your Magic Connections book last night thinking I would finish it in a few days. I became so involved in the adventures of the traveling troupe of entertainers that I spent the entire night reading until this...

★★★★ $15
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Val Andrews
Sherlock Holmes and The Prince of Ventriloquists by Val Andrews

A new century has dawned and for Holmes it signifies that he is soon to retire to Sussex to keep bees. Inspector Lestrade is already retired but looking for work as a store detective when he is informed of events concerning Arthur Prince, The Prince of Ventriloquists, which are so singular that he calls upon Holmes who demonstrates that his deductive powers are still as sharp as ever. Arthur Prince’s stage puppet has been stolen from his locked dressing room only to reappear some hours later. This strange event has now occurred on three different occasions, but stranger still is the fact that...

★★★★★ $8
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Displaying 1 to 26 (of 26 products)