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.
[4] Rawson was widely admired by his mystery-writing colleagues, and John Dickson Carr, master of "impossible crime" stories, dedicated the 1965 novel "The House at Satan's Elbow" to him.
Sometime between 2006 and 2011, his name was inscribed on his parents' double gravestone at a cemetery in Elyria, Lorain County, Ohio, noting the family connection and honoring a hometown boy who achieved fame.
The movie The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942), starring Lloyd Nolan, was based on No Coffin for the Corpse, but the Merlini character was replaced by Michael Shayne, a popular fictional private eye at the time, created by the writer Brett Halliday.
The Transparent Man, written by Rawson, starred Jerome Thor as The Great Merlini — who in this incarnation was a stage magician — with Barbara Cook as his assistant Julie, and featuring E. G. Marshall as a criminal.