Escape!

Sid Fleischman, a Newbery Medal-winning author and former professional magician who knew Houdini's widow, brings an insider's perspective to this biography of the world's most famous escape artist. The book traces Harry Houdini's life from his impoverished childhood to his death on Halloween night, 1926, examining the mythmaking and showmanship that made him immortal.

Fleischman opens by illustrating the lasting fascination with Houdini: a monogrammed pajama pocket sold at auction for nearly $4,000. He catalogs Houdini's legendary feats and introduces the central tension of the magician's life, the gap between legend and reality. Houdini always claimed he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, but his birth certificate reveals he was born as Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874, in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest, Hungary.

Ehrich's father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, held multiple academic degrees but could never earn a decent living. After emigrating to America, he sent for his wife, Cecilia, and their four sons. The family settled in Appleton, where a small Jewish community hired him as their first rabbi. Young Ehrich shined shoes, sold newspapers, and trained as an acrobat and contortionist. When the rabbi lost his congregation because he could not speak English, the family moved to Milwaukee, where poverty deepened. At 12, Ehrich ran away to ease the burden on his parents.

After drifting through several towns, Ehrich learned his father had relocated to New York and worked his way east. As a department-store messenger boy, he pooled savings with his father's earnings to reunite the family. His interest in magic deepened when he met Jacob Hayman, an amateur conjuror at the necktie factory where Ehrich worked. The pivotal moment came when Ehrich found a battered copy of the autobiography of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French magician who had modernized conjuring by performing in formal dress in fine theaters. Ehrich adopted the name "Houdini" on the faulty advice that adding an "i" to Houdin meant "like Houdin" in French, and changed his nickname Ehrie to Harry.

Houdini formed an act with Hayman and acquired a rigged trunk that became the basis for Metamorphosis, an illusion in which he switched places with his assistant in three seconds while bound and locked inside. When Hayman quit, Houdini recruited his younger brother Theodore, nicknamed Dash. The act struggled in beer halls and dime museums. On his deathbed, Rabbi Weiss extracted a promise from Houdini to care for Cecilia, a vow that fueled a lifelong devotion. Two weeks after meeting Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, an 18-year-old Roman Catholic performer called Bess, Houdini married her in 1894. The Houdinis briefly played Tony Pastor's Fourteenth Street Theater in New York but could not sustain the momentum. They joined a small circus for $25 a week. At an asylum in Nova Scotia, Houdini saw a straitjacket for the first time, bought one, and now possessed all the props that would make him famous.

In 1896–1897, the Houdinis hit bottom. Stranded in St. Louis, they stole potatoes and cooked them over a fire from a broken crate. Houdini offered to sell his secrets to newspapers for $20; no editor was interested. They joined a traveling medicine show in Kansas, where Houdini staged fake séances using cemetery research and local gossip. Though profitable, the séances troubled his conscience; the memory of his rabbi father led him to abandon the ghost business permanently. His breakthrough came in late 1898 when he challenged Chicago police to lock him in their own cuffs, strip him naked, and seal his mouth. He walked into the chief's office minutes later, fully dressed. The newspapers made him famous.

Martin Beck, a powerful booker for the Orpheum theater circuit, saw the Houdinis perform and advised Houdini to drop his card tricks and focus on escapes. Beck booked them across the circuit. In San Francisco in June 1899, Houdini became a sensation. Beck then advised them to storm Europe. On a passport application in London in August 1900, Houdini wrote "Appleton" as his birthplace, officially erasing his Budapest origins.

His London debut nearly collapsed when the Alhambra Theatre had no record of his booking. Houdini earned a spot by escaping Scotland Yard handcuffs in moments and was held over for six months. Over four and a half years, he conquered Europe. In Dresden, he leaped off a bridge in chains, defying police who had forbidden the stunt. In Russia, he entered the country despite a ban on foreign Jews and escaped from a notorious Siberian prison van. In Cologne, a police official accused him of fraud; Houdini sued for slander and won. In England, he survived punishing challenges, including handcuffs presented by the London Daily Illustrated Mirror and declared escape-proof before 4,000 spectators.

Returning to America, the Houdinis bought a brownstone in New York. Houdini developed jailbreaking into a publicity art and staged a dramatic manacled jump into the Detroit River, later claiming he survived under the ice by breathing trapped air. Fleischman reveals that temperature records show no ice existed that day; Houdini had invented the detail, transforming a routine stunt into legend.

Houdini bought a Voisin biplane and on March 16, 1910, made the first sustained flight in Australian skies. He debuted Walking Through a Brick Wall in 1914, an illusion in which he appeared to pass through a solid wall built onstage by masons. In 1918, he vanished a 10,000-pound elephant at the New York Hippodrome. His signature stage feat was the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was clamped by the ankles and lowered headfirst into a glass-fronted tank of water, escaping behind a curtain. He starred in several films, but his stiff acting failed on screen, and he returned to vaudeville.

Houdini's mother died in 1913 while he was abroad. A stroke had prevented her from speaking final words, and Houdini was haunted by what she had tried to say. This grief drove his crusade against Spiritualism, a movement whose practitioners claimed to communicate with the dead through séances. He attended hundreds of séances hoping for genuine contact with his mother but found only fraud, and offered $5,000 to any medium who could perform a feat he could not duplicate. The money went unclaimed. His friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a committed Spiritualist, collapsed when Houdini rejected a séance conducted by Conan Doyle's wife, Lady Doyle. Her "automatic writing," purportedly from Houdini's mother, opened with a Christian cross and was written in English, a language his mother did not speak.

Houdini's most formidable opponent was Mina "Margery" Crandon, a Boston medium who produced table-tipping, ectoplasm (a white substance believers called ghost essence), and a sarcastic invisible presence named Walter. When Scientific American declared Margery genuine, Houdini investigated and exposed her methods. The magazine withdrew its endorsement.

The fall 1926 tour proved fatal. Bess fell ill with food poisoning, and Houdini broke his ankle during a performance but refused to stop. At McGill University in Montreal, after a lecture on occult fraud, a student boxer visited Houdini's dressing room and asked to test his claimed ability to absorb body blows. Before Houdini could brace himself, the student delivered four rapid punches to his abdomen. Houdini continued performing through worsening agony and traveled to Detroit, where his temperature reached 104 degrees. Surgery revealed a ruptured appendix with advanced peritonitis; antibiotics had not yet been invented. On Halloween, Houdini told Dash, "I'm tired of fighting," took a last look at Bess, and died.

Houdini had left Bess a secret code as a prearranged test: any medium making genuine contact from beyond death would need to transmit it. Bess offered $10,000 to any medium who could relay this code but canceled the offer after two years of failed attempts. On the 10th anniversary of his death, a Hollywood rooftop séance produced no sign; at the moment Bess declared it over and extinguished the flame she had kept burning for a decade, a cloudburst struck. Before her own death in 1943, Bess revealed the secret words, "Rosabell" and "believe," and declared she would make no attempt to return from the dead herself. In an afterword, Fleischman dismisses two posthumous theories, that Houdini was poisoned by Spiritualists and that he served as an American spy, as examples of the ever-renewing myths surrounding the escape artist's name.