The Houdini Inheritance

The great illusionist Harry Houdini remains an intriguing figure years after his death in 1926. He had many friends in the entertainment business except for so-called mediums putting on fake séances who bitterly resented his determination to expose them. Now Emma Carroll, an experienced author, writes about the man and his background in her latest novel. Yet rather than allowing her narrative to grow from the often bizarre show business realities operating in Britain and America at the time, she comes up with a melodrama that quickly gets more confused and unlikely at each turn of the page.

The story is narrated as if by twelve-year old Glory, who lives near the sea in Devon with her older sister while their tattooist mother works in New York’s Coney Island. But while her half-Caribbean stage-struck friend Dennis comes over as real enough Glory never convinces, acting like an impulsive child at one moment and then sounding like a fluent adult for the purposes of continuing to tell her tale. Houdini and his wife, on a visit to Devon and who quickly turn into intimate friends, are little more than vehicles for helping the story along. Far too many adventures follow involving the trunk bearing all his magic secrets. Finally the sinister medium Mrs Crandon and her evil daughter Mae transpose from stage rivals to would-be assassins firing off pistols after failing to organise a drowning.

The author adds a three page historical note detailing what is known about Houdini’s death while also following up on what happened to various others, some of whom are characters in the story. This she does clearly and with obvious well-informed interest; if only the rest of her story had been written in the same vein!