MYSTERY IN MAGIC-LAND It ,somehow, would seem rather odd for us to think of a well-known movie star as being a camera "nut" - someone who seeks to augment his or her ever-growing collection of snapshots of actors at work or play. It would seem "silly" unlikely and "out of place" to most of us, I think.
There is, I understand, a new book just out which will take a bit of "getting used to idea". Imagine a longtime magician as a star in the sky. It will make interesting reading. I'm actually looking forward to reading all the facts which led the book's writer to deal a second career - that of having served as an international spy that time when when his nation and ours were at war with Germany's "Kaiser Bill" I am looking forward to reading how - Houdini - a man who dealt with some of the world's deepest mysteries with special skills of seeming management thereof. This puts Houdini in a class of "007" operators some eighty years ago.
This would be, perhaps, like calling Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson into a State-side murder case of some sort. One wonders how Houdini may have used his magic skills in espionage assignments. He could have anticipated subsequent inventors who brought us such innovative equipment as exploding chewing gum for blowing up bridges, railway stations, airports and space platforms; perhaps quasi-vermicelli strings fitted with metal-slicing innards for re-working unworkable plastics. He would have been good at it, I must admit.
The book, is really a 700,000-page database by two skilled writers named William Kalush and Larry Sloman. At first it was more of a "idea of interest." The actual material of Houdini himself revealed nothing upon which such a base might be built.
In time they came across a journal kept by a British agent
named William Melville - called a "British spymaster". He wrote of Houdini on several occasions in a diary repeatedly spoke of him as being, you might say ,"a duck out of water"...a magician and escape artist .... and entertainer working as a spy for Scotland Yard.
There are other reasons which this a book of special interest.
During his career, Houdini made several groups in unforgiving enemies when he continually endangered their income and
livelihood.
He caused money-making Spiritualists of his day to hate him because he proved them to be charlatans robbing the people.
He ridiculed all contact with the dead and proved their chicanery. Clairvoyant groups were also his avowed enemies. One day a "college student" beat him and delivered severe blows to his stomach. That same day in the evening a strange man waylaid him in the lobby of his hotel and again beat him once more with severe blows to the abdomen.
There is a good chance this new book is may bring to light more about his strange death.
Andrew McCaskey amccsr@adelphia.net 10-29-06 [c495wds]
