REAL V. FAKE HOUDINI

We’ve complained loudly about the History Channel’s upcoming pseudo-biographical treatment of Houdini’s life story. Some of our friends and fellow Houdiniphiles disagree with our contention that, in matters Houdini and all others, there should be a bright line between real and fake, between fact and fiction.

The Hollywood Reporter compares the fictional face of Houdini with the fact.

Admittedly, when it comes to Houdini research (or any historical research) facts can be notoriously difficult to pin down. Even the simplest fact can squirm like an angry bullhead that doesn’t want to be caught. For example, when writing our historical novel The Escape Artist: Harry Houdini in Russia, we needed to know what year a certain charlatan named Philippe was active at the Court of the Tsar. We checked three different memoirs, all written by eminent courtiers who were there on the scene. One said it happened in 1901. The second said it happened in 1902. And the third said it took place in 1903.

Thanking our lucky stars that we’re historical novelists (for purposes of the book) and not historians (which we are here on the blog), we went with 1903, the year Houdini was there. (Our choice was not quite so random as it sounds - we are prepared to defend it against all uppity professors who write smarty letters to The New York Times Book Review.) 

That year of 1903 marked the end of the “golden age” of the old Russian Empire. Rumblings of revolution were already in the air. To illustrate that we introduced a charming character named Samuel, who helped Houdini by making some very special equipment for him. Samuel was a fine craftsman and a political activist. As happens with hardworking fictional characters, Samuel found himself involved in a subplot of his own.

"I'm going to pick up Gershuni at the train station," Gorky whispered. "Where shall we meet?" Samuel felt a thrill. He was about to meet the "Tiger of the Revolution," the leader of the Battle Organization.

"When you come back, ask one of the workers in the chemical building for the men’s toilet.  I'll meet you there - we call it 'the club,'" Samuel said. "It's where we hold our secret meetings."

We didn't know, when we wrote that line, what old Russian public toilets looked like. (The Internet is fairly hilarious on the subject.) And how could they manage to be used as secret meeting places? Did you close them down for maintenance whenever you needed to consult with your comrades? The know-nothing, bean-counting coward's way out would be to do what the History Channel seems to be doing and, instead of sticking to the truth, just changing the script to fit whatever leftover scenery is available at a good price. Hey, we could have our plotters meet in some country cave. Who's gonna know the difference?

But the true historian hangs in there. And thus we came upon this wonderful film called Strike!, the debut docudrama of the great Russian director Sergei Eisenstein.



This clip from Strike! shows 'the club' as a special place where fiction and nonfiction merge. You will see the brilliant stage illusion mounted by the revolutionaries to keep their meetings secret. Finding real historical truth behind our fiction, we felt free to write that thanks to Samuel's association with Houdini he and his comrades learned to perform death-defying magic on their own. And it had world-changing consequences.





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