When Harry met Arthur: a friendship re-created
The Man From Beyond
By Gabriel Brownstein
Norton, 298 pp., $23.95
One of the 20th century's least likely friendships was that between Harry Houdini, the great magician, and Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. One was an American Jew, born abroad in 1874 but raised in rural Wisconsin, the other a Briton born in Edinburgh roughly a generation earlier. Houdini left school for the unrespectable life of the stage; Doyle became a physician, turned to literature, and was knighted. If their paths were to cross, it should have been at a distance, according to the class-ridden mores of the day, as performer and audience. Yet in 1920, an interest in the spirit world brought them together: Doyle the avid champion of Spiritualism, Houdini the notorious skeptic. Despite their differences, they liked, even fascinated each other. ''Houdini is far and away the most curious and intriguing character whom I have ever encountered," wrote Doyle after Houdini's death, ''but I have never met a man who had such strange contrasts in his nature, and whose actions and motives it was more difficult to foresee or to reconcile."
One other thing they had in common was a vast yearning to resume contact with their beloved deceased mothers. The Great War had brought a surge of belief in Spiritualism, and in 1916, as friends and relatives (and eventually his brother and a son) fell in the war, Doyle embraced it and became its best-known champion and missionary. Houdini too wanted to believe, but could see through the tricks that fraudulent mediums used, and became their best-known enemy and debunker. Demonstrations of their tricks became part of his stage repertoire of magic and miraculous escapes from life-threatening confinements -- so the two men faced each other from opposite sides of a line, offering audiences their own particular evasions of death.
Doyle's 1922-23 speaking tours filled American auditoriums nationwide. So did Houdini, denouncing Spiritualism as a hoax. They met, and liked each other. Houdini respected Doyle's sincerity, and was both amused and exasperated by Doyle's contention that Houdini's magic was due to unsuspected psychic powers of his own. Doyle identified with Houdini's feelings for his mother, and held a seance at which Lady Conan Doyle used her powers of ''automatic writing" to contact Houdini's mother.
Houdini allowed Doyle to believe he was impressed, but later went public to the contrary: His mother had been a religious Jew, yet Lady Conan Doyle had begun by making the sign of the cross on the first sheet of paper; his mother had communicated volubly in English, a language she could not speak or write in life; and she had not mentioned that that day was her birthday. To these objections, Doyle made reasonable replies, but Houdini persisted, and Doyle took offense on behalf of his wife's sincerity. The breach continued until Houdini's untimely death in 1926, particularly over the actions of a Boston medium known as Margery, who plays a crucial role in ''The Man From Beyond."
In this novel, Gabriel Brownstein turns these events into mystery. Each man seeks to win the other over to his point of view (what a triumph for each man's cause that would be!) while others plot to protect their racket by bringing Houdini down -- not merely by disgracing him, on the occasion of his latest death-defying stunt, but by sending him to the bottom of the Hudson River. The story is told through the eyes of an appealing young reporter, Molly Goodman, a winsome ''Jewish girl-socialist-perhaps-lesbian who went to Vassar," who sees in Houdini and Doyle a story that can lift her up out of the women's page. ''A public spat between Houdini and Doyle would make great copy," she thinks, as she struggles to get the pie throwing going.
This tale is a fantasy, the author warns, so it would be churlish to condemn its variances from history. Those who want the history can find it in Daniel Stashower's ''Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle," whose aid Brownstein acknowledges. But Brownstein's treatment of the protagonists is regrettably uneven. Houdini, who recorded his view of the matter in 1924 in ''A Magician Among the Spirits," is depicted persuasively, as an egoist of incredible physical presence and ability, and of passionate opinions. By contrast Doyle (who left his own account in his final book, ''The Edge of the Unknown") is barely outlined, and surprisingly colorless. He recedes into the background of a tale in which he and Houdini should be each other's foil, debating, arguing, upstaging each other, and competing for the next day's headlines.
And it is surely a lost opportunity of the first order not to have Doyle employ Sherlock Holmes's methods to investigate Houdini's disappearance in this novel, just as he had done successfully, several times, in tackling real-life crimes. Instead Doyle nearly fades away as the story moves toward its end. In one late chapter, for example, Doyle ''bites his mustache," ''draws in the margins of his notebook," ''feels helpless," even ''sympathizes suddenly with godless existential despair," but barely speaks a word, even when others address him: just three lines, 26 words, in the entire important chapter. One of the era's best storytellers has been deprived of his voice, and thereby his vivid and emphatic personality, and the reader is the loser for it.
Jon Lellenberg, the historian of the Baker Street Irregulars, is co-editing an annotated edition of Conan Doyle's letters to his mother, to be published by the Penguin Press. 
