My Weekly Book

This amazing story broke over the weekend. Turns out it’s been provoked by a recent biography of Houdini entitled The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Ratso Sloman in which it is suggested he was a secret agent working for American intelligence and in a feud with the Spiritualist movement that may have led to his murder. This truly is book publicity that you could neither buy nor predict. The paperback edition comes out in the UK in August.

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Below is an excerpt from a BBC news story on the subject. But it was the Guardian report that made me laugh out loud - it was rather irreverently headlined “Will Houdini be there? Remains to be seen…”

Bid to exhume Houdini’s remains

US forensic scientists are hoping to exhume the remains of escapologist Harry Houdini in an effort to find out whether he was murdered.

“We’ll examine his hairs, his fingernails, any bone fractures,” the head of the forensic team said.

Houdini died in the US city of Detroit in 1926 at the age of 52. There have been rumours that he was poisoned.

Relatives support the plan to examine the body and are due to formally request an exhumation on Monday.

The request will be made before a judge in New York, where the Hungarian-American performer was buried. Read on here…

And here’s a later Guardian article with a bit more detail: Final escape for the master of illusion

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under 2007 news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.