The Secret Life of Houdini

The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman

Category: Biography Grade: B-

It's hard to imagine but, in his day, mostly the early years of the 20th century, Houdini was about as big a superstar as it gets. This was an era before any kind of real mass media -- even the movies only kicked in late in Houdini's career. Born Erik Weisz in Hungary in 1874, the man who would become Harry Houdini was moved to the United States early in his life and became Elrich Weiss. He adopted the name Houdini as a tribute to a French magician named Robert-Houdin - a man that Houdini eventually turned on, publishing a book exposing him as a fraud.

Houdini was really one of the first to understand the values of self-promotion. Everything he did in his early life was designed with one purpose - to promote the career of Harry Houdini. For example, when he first became an escape artist and for most of his career, he would, on arriving in a new town for a show, head straight for the local police office. There, he would challenge the local cops to secure him in any combination of standard-issue handcuffs, leg irons, even jail cells and proceed to astonish everybody (including, of course, the assembled press) with his ability to escape. Throughout his career, he maintained close relations with not only local police all over the world but also the leaders of the Secret Service and Britain's MI-5. In one of the controversial aspects of the book, the authors show reasonably convincing evidence that Houdini acted throughout his life as an unofficial resource for these spy agencies.

Late in his career, Houdini became a crusader against the Spiritualist Movement, the religion that was predicated on the ability to speak, through mediums, to the dead. Especially after the death of the mother to whom he was devoted, Houdini desperately wanted to uncover the path to communicating with the dead but eventually, through his unique knowledge of showmanship and scam, came to denounce every medium he came across as a fraud. He repeatedly offered big rewards to any medium who could show an ability to communicate that couldn't be easily duplicated with the trick's of Houdini and, of course, never had to pay off. He became a major antagonist to the movement that was spearheaded by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle, late in his life, was the most visible advocate of Spiritualism.

As a life story, Houdini's is fascinating. As a biography, this one leaves a little to be desired. Like a lot of today's movies, it could have used a much more forceful editor. Big chunks of the book prove highly repetitive -- Houdini was locked in chains, then escaped; Houdini was locked in other chains, then escaped -- over and over and over again. Once his career took off, Houdini never had much trouble filling an audience but, after all the repetition, its hard to understand how.

This book does give great pictures of the vaudeville/entertainment world of the early 20th century and a terrific overview of the Spiritualist Movement. It could have been a great one if somebody had convinced the author to trim a hundred pages or so.