Harry Houdini Mysteries

by Daniel Stashower

  I tried to imagine a Park Avenue gathering that featured my brother dining on cutlery and burning cigars. “That act may not be quite appropriate,” I said.

  “Don’t be so hasty, Dash,” Harry said. “I have made a few refinements to the routine, to make it more agreeable to a general audience. Allow me to demonstrate.”

  “Harry,” said Bess, “this is hardly the time or place for stone-eating.”

  “Perhaps not, but what I intend to do is no mere stone-eating effect. Mrs. Clairmont, I wonder if you would do me the honor of lending your assistance.”

  “My assistance? Of course, Mr. Houdini.”

  My brother stepped to her side and knelt beside the chair. “I notice that you have brought your sewing basket. If you are anything like my mother, you will have several packets of needles in there. Is this so?”

  “Yes. I always keep a good supply on hand.”

  “Might I borrow one of those packets?”

  Mrs. Clairmont appeared baffled by the request but readily agreed. After a moment’s rummaging in her basket, she produced a packet of Clarkson sewing needles.

  “These look ideal for my purpose,” Harry said, tearing open the paper packet. He sprinkled the loose needles into his open hand and held them out for examination. “Does everyone see the needles?” he asked. “Is there anything suspicious about them?”

  “Of course not,” said Lieutenant Murray. “Why should there be anything suspicious about needles?”

  “Why, indeed?” Without another word, Harry popped the loose needles into his mouth. Dr. Wells and Mrs. Clairmont looked on with alarm as Harry made an exaggerated chewing motion, rubbing his stomach as though he found the metal diet to be especially appetizing. Snapping and grinding noises could be plainly heard. After a moment, Harry made a large gulp of satisfaction, indicating that the needles had been swallowed.

  “How very delectable—” he began.

  “What have you done, lad?” cried the doctor. “Those needles will play havoc with your digestive tract!”

  “Do you think so? Well, I guess we had better do something about that. First, may I ask you to take a quick look inside my mouth? As a medical man, you can offer your assurance that I have not concealed the needles beneath my tongue or something of that sort.”

  “Houdini, this is most irregular.”

  “Indulge me,” my brother said with a smile.

  With a sigh, Dr. Wells stepped forward and peered inside Harry’s mouth. “Open wider,” he said, closing one eye for a better look. “Lift your tongue. All right.” He stepped back. “There’s nothing hidden in there,” he said firmly.

  “Thank you,” said Harry. “Mrs. Clairmont, if you would open your sewing basket once more, I shall trouble you for a length of cotton thread. Three feet or so should do nicely. I would also like to ask you to knot the thread in some distinctive way. You may wish to put a series of knots at regular or irregular intervals, or perhaps you might wish to tie a single knot that is doubled or tripled. I only wish to insure that you will recognize this piece of thread when you see it at the conclusion of my effect.” Harry nodded approvingly as Mrs. Clairmont deftly tied off a series of six knots.

  Taking the thread from Mrs. Clairmont, Harry placed one end in his mouth and began sucking it into his mouth as if it were a long noodle of some kind. Again he made exaggerated swallowing sounds and patted his stomach to indicate that he found the thread to be especially tasty. After a moment or so, he had drawn in all but the tail end of the thread, which was left dangling from his lips.

  Silently thrusting his index finger into the air, Harry motioned for our strictest attention, as if our focus might have wandered during this singular display. With a count of three upon his fingers, he pinched the visible end of the thread between his thumb and index finger and slowly began to draw its length from his mouth.

  After a moment, a tiny sliver of metal glinted in the afternoon sun. One of the needles Harry had swallowed could be seen dangling upon the thread. Mrs. Clairmont let out a cry of surprise. Harry merely smiled and continued tugging at the thread. A second, and then a third needle emerged from his mouth, followed by half a dozen more, all neatly threaded upon the cotton strand.

  In time this trick would become a signature effect of my brother’s, known throughout the world as the Needles and Thread. It became a favorite impromptu stunt, and I would see him perform it for street urchins and also for a president of the United States, but I cannot recall any occasion that produced so profound an impression as that first showing in Central Park. By the time Harry had drawn the tail end of the thread out of his mouth, our small audience—Bess and myself included—had erupted in applause and cheers. Harry’s cheeks glowed as he asked Mrs. Clairmont to confirm that the needles and thread were the same that she had lent. Upon receiving her confirmation, he bowed deeply and drank in our approval.

  “Could you please show me how you did that, Mr. Houdini?” came a voice from behind us.

  We turned to see Lila Craig standing behind us, clutching a woolen scarf in her hands. “Oh, there you are, dear,” called Mrs. Clairmont. “Thank you for fetching my wrap. I’m sure Mr. Houdini would be delighted to teach you one of his tricks, if you ask him nicely.”

  “Would you, Mr. Houdini?” the girl asked prettily.

  “It would be my pleasure, Lila,” Harry said.

  “Oh, that is not her name,” said Mrs. Clairmont. “That is the name Mr. Craig gave to her. Her real name is Mina. Mina Stinson.”

  “My friends call me Margery,” the girl said.

  “How do you do, Margery,” said Harry, lifting his hat.

  “I’m thinking of sending her to school in Boston,” Mrs. Clairmont said. “I see no reason why she should suffer for Mr. Craig’s crimes.”

  “That is most generous of you, Mrs. Clairmont,” I said.

  “It is nothing. I predict a bright future for this girl, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Hardeen?”

  “Most certainly.”

  “Mrs. Clairmont is too kind,” said the girl, with a becoming smile. “I hope that you and your brother will visit me in Boston one day, Mr. Hardeen.”

  “I’m sure we shall,” I said.

  “Now, then, Margery,” Harry said, pulling a pack of cards from his pocket, “here is an effect that will baffle your friends and confound your enemies. Watch closely as I shuffle the deck and cut it into three piles...”

  “Hardeen,” said Dr. Wells, coming up beside me, “might I have a word in private?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Would you join us, Lieutenant Murray?” the doctor added, leading us along one of the walkways out of Mrs. Clairmont’s hearing.

  We walked for a moment in silence. Behind us, we could hear Mina Stinson’s laughter as Harry’s card trick reached its climax. After a moment, Dr. Wells stopped and looked back at Mrs. Clairmont’s basket chair. “I wanted to add my thanks to Augusta’s,” he began. “You and your brother have done her a great service.” He folded his hands. “More than she will ever know,” he added significantly.

  “You’re referring to Mr. Foster’s death?”

  “And that of her husband,” he said. “It’s bad enough that Sterling engineered this plot against Edgar, but to have killed his own brother-in-law—it’s incredible. Augusta must never know. She’s far too delicate. I cannot impress this upon you strongly enough.”

  “The secret is safe with us,” I assured him. “We’re very good with secrets.”

  “You can rely on Hardeen,” said Lieutenant Murray. “He’s as good as his word.”

  Dr. Wells nodded. “I’m just grateful that Augusta wasn’t in the study when that—that device started working again.”

  “But it’s lucky the rest of us were,” the lieutenant said. “Incredible thing. What did Foster call it? The televisor?”

  “Television “ I said.

  “Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now,” Dr. Wells said. “Sterling’s plans were nothing more than thumbn
ail sketches. There’s barely a hint of how the machine worked.”

  “What about the music box in Mr. Clairmont’s study? Foster told me he had hidden one of his special tubes in the speaker horn.”

  “It’s gone now,” Wells said. “Lucius Craig must have taken it.”

  I shook my head. “The apparatus I saw in the cellar looked pretty solid,” I said. “Surely some trace of the machinery has survived.”

  Lieutenant Murray shook his head. “The entire room was gutted by the fire. I’m telling you, Hardeen, it’s a miracle that your brother managed to pull you out of there. It looked like a blast furnace when we got down there. I thought you were both finished.”

  I looked back toward the castle. Harry was entertaining Mina Stinson with a hand-to-hand card cascade. “I guess I’ll have to owe him one,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t do to have a lot of people coming around asking questions about the television device,” Dr. Wells continued. “I’ve asked your brother to keep silent about that, as well. He agreed readily enough. He told me that it was a tale for which the world was not yet prepared.” The doctor watched as Harry pulled a series of silver coins from Mina’s ear. “Unusual man, your brother. He’ll go far.”

  “Perhaps so,” I said. “But there’s one area where I will always be able to claim the advantage.”

  “What’s that?”

  I grinned and pushed my hat back on my head. “I’ve appeared on television.”

  “What did Dr. Wells want with you?” Harry asked, as we left the others to make our way home.

  “He wanted to be certain that we intended to keep quiet about the matter. He was concerned about Mrs. Clairmont’s health.”

  “Overly concerned, I would say,” Harry answered.

  “Surely not,” said Bess. “The woman has suffered a terrible shock already. A second blow might well—”

  “Mrs. Clairmont is not quite the delicate flower that she seems,” Harry said. “She is a remarkable woman.”

  “What do you mean, Harry?”

  He stopped walking and fished in his pocket. “As I was saying good-bye just now, she slipped this into my hand.” He held up a piece of glass and let it glint in the fading sunlight.

  “Good lord, Harry! It’s the—”

  “The Foster tube,” he said. “So far as I know, it’s the only one left.”

  “But that means that she knows everything!”

  “So it would seem,” Harry said.

  I turned and looked back down the path, catching a receding glimpse of Dr. Wells pushing the basket chair toward the southern entrance of the park. “Well,” I said. “I’ll be a fish on a bicycle.”

  “Indeed,” Harry said.

  Bess studied the tube for a moment and then looked up at Harry. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Can’t you guess?” He gripped the glass tube by its base and held it high over his head. Opening his mouth, he let it fall in.

  “How very delectable,” he said.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In reading the final chapters of this book, some readers may well accuse the author of trying to pull a fast one. Houdini himself once had occasion to say, in similar circumstances, “Everything I do is accomplished by material means, humanly possible, no matter how baffling it is to the layman.”

  While the author has never vanished an elephant or walked through a solid brick wall, he is on firm ground when it comes to research. The strange device mentioned in the book’s final pages was, in fact, conceived and patented many years before the action of this story, though many more years would pass before it emerged in a practical and commercial form.

  As Houdini himself might have said, “Would I lie to you?”

  THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN

  Editor’s Foreword

  I was not the one who discovered the note from John H. Watson to Bess Houdini, but I was the first to recognise that John H. Watson was not the John Watson from Nebraska, who juggled meat hooks, but the famous Dr John H. Watson, biographer and companion of Sherlock Holmes.

  It happened shortly after the death of Al Grasso, when we members of the New York City Society of American Magicians began sorting through the accumulated clutter in his shop, The Grasso-Hornmann Magic Company. Grasso’s was — and is — New York’s most peculiar landmark. It is the oldest magic store in America, and the spiritual birthplace of many of our greatest magicians. In almost any other magic store in the country you’ll find the magic enclosed in glass cases. Not so at Grasso’s. At Grasso’s you dive into the tricks as you would a pile of leaves. It’s not so much a store as a museum, a dim warehouse on the second floor of an old office building, where printed silks and tasseled wands and huge metal hoops are all jumbled together and randomly stuffed into boxes and onto shelves. The place is full of magic books and pamphlets, some of them very rare, none of them in any kind of order. In one corner is a scarred leather-top desk where Al Grasso kept his records, such as they were, and hanging above it there are more than one hundred sepia photographs of the great vaudeville magicians. And when the sun is shining in through the back window, you can catch a glimpse of some huge stage illusion among the stacks of packing crates — the corner of The Mummy’s Asrah, or the golden tail of The Chinese Dragon — relics of the great full-evening magic shows of the 1920s and ‘30s.

  It’s a wonder that anybody ever found anything of use in all that dust and clutter, but every year thousands of magicians would come — beginners and professionals — and each of them would uncover the one book, trick, or memento which he had always wanted and had never been able to find.

  Straightening the place out, then, even with the best of intentions was a sad, almost blasphemous task. We took our slow and deferential time about it, allowing the older members time to pause over each piece of memorabilia and tell stories of the old days. Working in this fashion, we did not begin excavating Al Grasso’s desk until the third afternoon, and in the process uncovered a brittle, coffee-stained manila envelope marked “Return to Bess Houdini.”

  It was like hearing sleigh bells on Christmas Eve. We all knew that Al Grasso had been a close friend of Mrs Houdini. We also knew that sometime during the First World War Grasso’s, then called Martinka’s, had been owned by Harry Houdini. But most of us regarded Houdini as something of a mythical figure, and it just didn’t seem possible that we could be holding an envelope, an envelope with coffee stains on it, meant to be given to his wife. Maybe it was something that had belonged to Houdini, we thought. Maybe it was the plans to an escape. The whole group of us, about seven that afternoon, stared at the envelope for about five minutes before someone finally dumped the contents out onto the newly cleared desktop.

  The first item we examined did a lot to dispel our reverence. It was a photograph of Houdini and a friend, in which the great magician, unaware he was being photographed full length, was standing on his toes to appear taller than the other man. The Great Houdini was embarrassed about his height!

  There were more pictures in the envelope, mostly of Houdini and other, shorter magicians. And there were letters to and from Houdini concerning the sale of Martinka’s. And finally, there was a small piece of yellowed notepaper which had fallen to the floor and went unnoticed until Matt the Mindreader picked it up, read it, said, “Huh! The meat hook man!” and passed it to me. The note read:

  12 December 1927

  Dear Mrs Houdini,

  Again let me extend my warmest sympathies for the loss of your husband. I know what it is to lose a cherished spouse, and can well appreciate that the long months since his passing have done little to ease your grief. Under separate cover I am sending my chronicle of the adventure we shared in London, some twenty years ago now. Though I have no intention at present of making the facts public, I flatter myself that the account of your husband’s remarkable exploits may bring some pleasure to you in these unhappy times. I remain,

  Your Humble Servant,

  John H. Watson

  For
the second time that day I felt the thrill of discovering a tangible link to one of my idols, and even more astonishingly, evidence that Sherlock Holmes and Harry Houdini had actually met! No sooner had I considered this possibility than an even more incredible one occurred to me: perhaps somewhere in the store lay an unpublished Watson manuscript!

  As I recall it, I explained this possibility to my friends in my usual measured, sonorous tones. They insist I shouted like a madman. Either way, we began a frantic, reckless search for the manuscript in the darkest recesses of Grasso’s. All the while I tried not to think of how slim the chances of finding it were. Even if Watson’s manuscript had arrived at Martinka’s, it would almost surely have been forwarded, discarded, or lost forever in the jumble that became Grasso’s. But at that moment we were all too caught up in the search to worry about any of that. We must have looked like the Keystone Kops, diving into stacks of papers, dumping out cartons of documents, and rifling through the files; not missing a trick, as it were. Manuscripts were uncovered and hastily scanned, only to be revealed as treatises on dove vanishing or coin manipulation. Then, miraculously, after only twenty minutes or so, we found Dr Watson’s manuscript. It had been serving as a shim under the unsteady leg of a goldfish vanish table. Ignominious as this may seem, it probably saved the manuscript from being thrown out.

  The bundle was in fairly good condition, apart from the sinkhole where the table leg had rested. The first few pages were on the point of crumbling and the last few were stained with oil or grease, but all of it was legible. I know this because I immediately sat down and read straight through while my friends tried to repair the damage done by our search. If possible, Grasso’s was now even more disordered than when we began cleaning it three days before, and we then abandoned all hope of restoring it to order; but I had an original, unpublished Sherlock Holmes story.

  That’s where my troubles really began. If discovering a Watson manuscript seemed unlikely, convincing the world of the discovery bordered on the impossible. I faced an army of disbelievers. To begin with, the sceptics said the writing was not Watson’s; but surely he would not, at the age of seventy-five, have made his own longhand copies. Then there were those who doubted that he would have gone to the trouble of writing the story merely to cheer up Mrs Houdini. I can only answer that that is exactly the sort of man he was. Furthermore, in 1927 Watson had no real need of money and would have been able to pursue whatever writing appealed to him.