WHEN HARRY MET HOWARD: LOVECRAFT ON HOUDINI

Lovecraft wrote thousands of letters on upside-down hotel stationery.

It was love at first sight, according to the Lovecrafters. They talked books and libraries far into the night and Houdini threw a ton of money at him.

As his letters make clear, H.P. Lovecraft suspected that Houdini was indeed a genius, and that it takes one to know one.

Click to enlarge. Last paragraph of first page and first paragraph of second concern Houdini.

As their relationship deepened, Lovecraft seemed a bit aggravated by Houdini’s ego. But he did not bite the hand that fed him. 

According to L. Sprague deCamp’s bio of Lovecraft, Harry made a last minute telephone appeal for Lovecraft to come to Detroit in 1926. This tracks curiously with what we published earlier from Harry’s friend Al Hirschfeld - that he received an urgent call from Houdini shortly before he died. 

Houdiniphiles: do we know of any other deathbed communications between Harry and his friends? Did he reach out elsewhere?





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