Harry Houdini Was a Very Interesting Man

Harry Houdini was a fascinating character, spending his life travelling the world astounding the general public, going to greater and more dangerous extremes as each of his showpieces became old hat. He began with simple handcuff escapes behind a curtain, but graduated to challenging the general public to bring any container up on stage to try and hold him (he once even escaped from a giant fake sea monster made of sewn-together flesh), removing himself from prison cells around the world to drum up publicity, and jumping into rivers and escaping underwater from cuffs and chains. Sadly, as with all magic, when you find out how it's all done that wondrous sheen is removed from his tricks. Before you find out the mundane truth, it's always tempting to ignore logic and think there must have been some superhuman mastery taking place, but often the least interesting solution you can come up with is the right one. So, when Houdini was escaping from any container an unknown member of the public could build, these were usually confidants, or he'd met the challengers beforehand and bribed them to leave a few nails loose so he could escape; or when he escaped from jail cells, he had keys or lock picks hidden on his body. Of course, being a contemporary of Houdini and not knowing any of this made him seem like a voodoo master, and he was still an amazing contortionist and lock picker. He always performed his escapes behind a curtain, and it's unbelievable to think that he could hold an audience rapt for an hour with nothing but his writhing shadow and an orchestra to keep them entertained.

Later in his career, riddled by the injuries inflicted by years of contorting his frame to escape from seemingly impossible positions, Houdini slowed down his stage routine and became a full-time Spiritualist debunker, disguising himself as an old man and infiltrating seances to show up phony mediums. He had run-ins with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an advocate of Spiritualism and Houdini's one-time friend, who once released a mocked photo of a little girl with fairies from a story book superimposed on it, believing it to be evidence of spirits. It's a funny photo. Doyle thought that Houdini himself possessed Spiritualist powers without even knowing it, so bamboozled was he by the tricks the master performed.

All of this stuff is in the book The Secret Life of Houdini, a thrilling read. The only minor problem with it is that the authors were desperate for a USP to make their biography different to any other, so cobbled together a silly theory about Houdini's life as a spy, based solely on wild conjecture, including at one point a claim that Houdini escaped from a crate in half an hour, but his diary confirms that he didn't appear to the audience until an hour had passed, giving him the perfect alibi to engage in spy work. Um. Ignore the spy stuff, and focus on the life of the best magician the world has ever known. Neatly, the book leaves a few of Houdini's tricks as mysteries, so if you want you can (like me) still pretend that there was something supernatural in his abilities.