Rawson, Clayton - The Headless Lady

The Headless Lady (1940) is a mystery with a circus background. Chapters 2-4 vividly recreate a traditional circus, with all its special slang and events. Rawson, who was a professional illustrator as well as a novelist, includes an aerial drawing of the circus. The picture and the text specify with unusual precision the geographic layout of all aspects of the circus. The novel embodies the Golden Age fascination with elaborately described architecture and landscapes, with here the architecture being the layout of the circus. Rawson is also big on circus slang. 1930's circus argot includes words that would later spread to other subcultures: "the fuzz", for the police, and "being hep to" something, indicating having knowledge about a subject, a term that would be used by the Beats and jazz musicians in the 1950's. After its opening, this turns into a long, uninspired novel, one without impossible crimes, except for a brief prison escape. Rawson includes a mystery novelist as a character, researching the circus for a book; this novelist is especially interested in collecting the words used by circus people. This novelist character is named Stuart Towne, which is also the pseudonym used by Rawson on some of his pulp magazine novellas. One suspects that Rawson has included himself as a character in his own novel. Later, William L. DeAndrea will include himself as a character in Killed in Paradise (1988) under one of his own pseudonyms, a similar reflexive device. Agatha Christie's mystery writer character, Ariadne Oliver, is also a thinly disguised self-portrait.

Mike Grost