Author: William Kalush and Larry Sloman
Publisher: Atria Books
Price: £18.99
Isbn: 9780743272070

Nobody understood the Harry Houdini brand better than Erik Weisz (or ‘Weiss’), who adopted the name in homage to Eugene Robert-Houdin. He probably learnt his marketing skills as a performer in dime museums, circuses and medicine shows. Houdini and his wife Bess had a tough four years on the road. He developed Metamorphosis, a trunk substitution act; he and his wife Beth even became mediums. But by 1898, Houdini had had enough of scraping a living on tour.

Then in January 1899, The Chicago Journal published an account of his handcuff challenge – a concept he had borrowed from the Spiritualists – to the city police, and his career exploded. He pitched his challenges to police departments throughout the Midwest, so he appeared to be a security consultant. What the police got out of this is anybody’s guess – kudos by association?

William Kalush and Larry Sloman hypothesise that for the rest of his life, Houdini was an agent of the United States and British security and intelligence services. They tantalisingly reveal that John E Wilkie, formerly of the Chicago press corps, was absent. But there was no reason why Wilkie should be present – he had been appointed chief of the US Secret Service the previous year… The authors’ trenches do not go deep and their monument becomes infirm the higher they build. Wilkie signed up actors; he told the Washington Post that he employed magicians as agents. But Kalush and Sloman produce no evidence that connects Houdini to the US Secret Service.

In 1900, Houdini came to London, where almost his first act was to issue a handcuff challenge to Superintendent William Melville, head of Special Branch and influential in the creation of the security and intelligence services. Kalush and Sloman find this a significant development in Houdini’s career in espionage, and suggest – on the basis of entries in Melville’s diary – that he was an agent of the Directorate of Military Operations.

Melville recruited and ran agents, and was referred to in correspondence as ‘M’. The first head of MI5 was Vernon Kell; he and later heads were known as ‘K’ until the 1940s. But when Houdini first travelled to Germany in 1900, Melville’s remit was counter-insurgency, not military intelligence. Houdini probably passed information to Melville, but this does not imply that he was an agent.

Sloman and Kulush devote relatively few words to the ‘secret’ areas of Houdini’s life. Perhaps there has been too much Freudian analysis in the past of his relationships with his mother and with Bess. However, it is the secrets of these relationships that probably created many of the motivations and behaviours of his adult life. The death of his mother – and Spiritualists’ responses – shaped his attitudes to exposing fraudulent mediums. In 1925, Houdini created a sophisticated network of “showgirls”, actresses, private detectives and even former mediums to gather intelligence of their activities. He installed bugs and an induction loop at home so he could eavesdrop on visitors.

The spectacular debunking of the phony spiritualists, particularly ‘Marjery’, leads Kalush and Sloman to conclude that Houdini was murdered. This idea may have originated with the New York publisher Bernarr Macfadden, and has been repeated in headlines around the world, but it is not apparent in the archives from the days immediately after his death on Hallowe’en 1926. There was no post mortem examination of the body, and paucity of evidence leads to speculation.

The hypothesis has become associated with this biography through calls for an exhumation by Houdini’s great-nephew, George Hardeen. Not all of the Houdini family support the exhumation; many relatives believe that Bess would never have wanted it.

Kalush and Sloman implicate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the alleged murder on the basis of a comment in a 1924 letter from Doyle to Dr LRG Crandon, Marjery’s husband: Houdini would “get his deserts very exactly meted out… I think there is a general pay-day coming soon [and] we can await it with equanimity.” Doyle’s correspondence is often vitriolic, but Doyle and his wife believed that the world was facing cataclysm. He often refers to the End Time with such euphemisms.

Ill-founded arguments perhaps make this book a poor biography, and its copious notes are published only online.

Yet Kalush (a board member of the Conjuring Arts Research Centre) and Sloman (who has worked with David Blaine) have produced an engaging and evocative read.