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.
"His chronicler, free-lance writer Ross Harte, notes that Merlini hates the New York City Subway system, beer, inactivity, opera, golf, and sleep.
He is, on the other hand, highly partial to surf bathing, table tennis, puzzles, circuses, and Times Square, where he operates a magic shop.
The 1942 movie The Man Who Wouldn't Die, 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.