Writing Magic Without Breaking the Spell: Guest Post by Gigi Pandian

During the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 30s, fair-play puzzle plots gave readers all the clues they needed to solve the mystery. It was common to see a stage magician as the sleuth or other prominent character. Why? Because magicians use misdirection to create seemingly impossible illusions, so they’re the perfect characters to see through baffling puzzles. 

I adore those classic mysteries, and my favorites were the locked-room mysteries by authors like John Dickson Carr and Clayton Rawson, where the crime looks truly impossible. Their books and stories inspired me to try my hand at writing my own impossible crime puzzles—with a stage magician sleuth, of course.

Tempest Raj is a stage illusionist creating grand illusions on the stage, until her career is sabotaged and she’s forced to move home to work for the family business, Secret Staircase Construction. Now she creates a different type of illusion, building “magic” into people’s homes through sliding bookcases that lead to hidden libraries or sconces that reveal secrets when lifted. The sleight-of-hand methods might be different, but the idea behind the illusions are the same. Misdirection. While your attention is held elsewhere, you miss the mechanism creating magic. 

Just like I love magicians in mystery fiction, I love a well-crafted stage show, and I’ve learned a great deal about stage magic. But when I started writing novels about a magician character, I had to walk a fine line: I wanted to write authentically about magic without revealing trade secrets and I wanted to play fair with the reader, so they’d feel they’d read a satisfying mystery when all was revealed at the end. 

As I learned more about magic, I had my answer: Crimes in mystery fiction that look similar can have many different methods. The same is true of the illusions of a stage magician. When you see a trick performed, there are often multiple methods that could have been used to perform what looks to the audience like the same illusion. Therefore, I could use the methods of an illusionist to think about constructing Tempest’s acts as well as the illusions of the culprits in the Secret Staircase Mysteries—with my own methods I’d worked out for both Tempest’s illusions and the puzzle at the heart of the mystery. 

One more similarity between mystery fiction and magic: As with a novel, a key ingredient of stage magic is to tell a story. If a magician simply walks on stage and makes their assistant vanish, that’s not very interesting. But if there’s a story behind why a that person is vanishing, such as centuries-old curse that’s come to claim a victim, the illusion immediately becomes ten times more captivating. 

In my latest novel, The Library Game, Secret Staircase Construction is converting a charming old house into a community library devoted to classic detective fiction—until there’s a seemingly impossible murder in the library, the body vanishes, and a dead man with a connection to the house is heard calling for help. It’s like something right out of a magic act. It’s a good thing Tempest Raj is there.

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Gigi Pandian is a USA Today bestselling author and locked-room mystery enthusiast who’s been awarded Agatha, Anthony, Lefty, and Derringer awards, and been a finalist for the Edgar. She writes the Secret Staircase mysteries, the Accidental Alchemist mysteries, and the Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt mysteries. Gigi lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and a gargoyle who watches over the backyard garden. Her new Secret Staircase mystery, The Library Game, was published in March 2025. Connect with Gigi and sign up for her email newsletter at www.gigipandian.com