HOUDINI & LOVECRAFT

The cover copy should read: "Story by Houdini, Written by H.P. Lovecraft."

J.C. Henneberger was desperate. His startup magazine, Weird Tales, owed $43,000 to the printer. In 1924, that was a real fortune, and the magazine was just one year old.

He had a brilliant inspiration. His wealthy and famous friend Harry Houdini had serious literary aspirations. Sitting in his home library, at a desk once used by Edgar Allan Poe, Harry had even written a very bad novella. He had been a supporter of Weird Tales from the beginning, contributing since March a column called “Ask Houdini” and two "nonfiction" cover stories ghostwritten by Walter B. Gibson, creator of The Shadow.

The Houdini covers had not gotten the circulation where it needed to be. Henneberger was reluctant to ask Houdini for money directly. But publishers are wily and he played a wild and wily card. He had just discovered a brilliant new writer, named H. P. Lovecraft. He believed Lovecraft was the new Edgar Allan Poe. 

He made Harry an offer he could not resist: Would Houdini like to collaborate on writing fiction with Lovecraft?

According to Lovecraft’s biographers, Houdini said yes without even meeting the man first. He was convinced after reading this letter from Lovecraft to Henneberger, recently unearthed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas:

Click to enlarge.  (From the Messmore Kendall Collection)

Lovecraft was naturally quite intrigued to partner with the most famous man in the world. As a youngster he had seen Houdini perform in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island around the year 1898, and again years later. He, like Houdini, was a vocal skeptic of spiritualist charlatans.

They signed a writing deal for “colossal sums of money,” according to Lovecraft's biographers. 

Harry got not only a first class writer/collaborator, he also acquired a fellow debunker.  According to their mutual friend, pulp fiction writer C.M. Eddy, Houdini enlisted Lovecraft as an undercover investigator, part of his "Secret Service" dedicated to rooting spiritualists out of high-end publishing (viz., Scientific American), the halls of Congress and the Coolidge White House.

More on Houdini and Lovecraft in future posts.

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