Under the pseudonym Stuart Towne, Rawson wrote four pulp novellas as Don Diavolo. The author was one of the four founding members of the Mystery Writers of America and created its motto: “Crime Does Not Pay—Enough.”

“From Another World” was first published in the June 1948 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Great Merlini (Boston, Gregg Press, 1979).

From Another World

By Clayton Rawson

IT WAS undoubtedly one of the world’s strangest rooms. The old-fashioned roll-top desk, the battered typewriter, and the steel filing cabinet indicated that it was an office. There was even a calendar memo-pad, a pen and pencil set, and an overflowing ashtray on the desk, but any resemblance to any other office stopped right there.

The desk top also held a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen billiard balls, a shiny nickel-plated revolver, one celluloid egg, several decks of playing cards, a bright green silk handkerchief, and a stack of unopened mail. In one corner of the room stood a large, galvanized-iron milk-can with a strait jacket lying on its top. A feathered devil mask from the upper Congo leered down from the wall above and the entire opposite wall was papered with a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey twenty-four sheet poster.

A loose-jointed dummy-figure of a small boy with pop-eyes and violently red hair lay on the filing cabinet together with a skull and a fish-bowl filled with paper flowers. And in the cabinet’s bottom drawer, which was partly open and lined with paper, there was one halfeaten carrot and a twinkly-nosed, live white rabbit.

A pile of magazines, topped by a French journal, l’Illusioniste, was stacked precariously on a chair, and a large bookcase tried vainly to hold an even larger flood of books that overflowed and formed dusty stalagmites growing up from the floor—books whose authors would have been startled at the company they kept. Shaw’s Joan of Arc was sandwiched between Rowan’s Story of the Secret Service and the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin. Arthur Machen, Dr. Hans Gross, William Blake, Sir James Jeans, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ernest Hemingway were bounded on either side by Devol’s Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft.

The merchandise in the shop beyond the office had a similar surrealistic quality, but the inscription on the glass of the outer door, although equally strange, did manage to supply an explanation. It read: Miracles For Sale—THE MAGIC SHOP, A. Merlini, Prop.

And that gentleman, naturally, was just as unusual as his place of business. For one thing, he hadn’t put a foot in it, to my knowledge, in at least a week. When he finally did reappear, I found him at the desk sleepily and somewhat glumly eyeing the unopened mail.