WRITTEN BY HOUDINI HIMSELF!?

Just as Houdini’s feature film The Grim Game appeared in 1919, Hollywood officially became the fiction factory of the planet.

The print-oriented world of the previous two hundred years tottered. Publishers began to scramble for “names from the pictures” in order to prevent starvation on Grub Street.

Thus was born The Kinema Comic, a British weekly that featured “The Amazing Exploits of Houdini.” These rather charming adventures were, it assured us in black and white, “written by Houdini himself.”

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Houdini did indeed hold copyright to this series, which ran from 1922 to 1926, in more than thirty episodes. But according to a 2006 British PhD. thesis by literary researcher Julia Jones, Harry shared the rights with the real writer: Herbert Allingham. 

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Allingham was a prolific fiction writer, editor of The London Journal and creator of such deathless pulp as "The Spell of a Rogue."

Herbert was also the father of Margery Allingham, creator of the gentleman detective Albert Campion, who lives on today in various BBC television series and is considered one of the “great detectives” of fiction. The latest Campion novel, Mr. Campion’s Farewell, was published in 2014, by a crime writer who completed one of the Allingham family’s unfinished manuscripts. Thus expands the widening circle of writers and artists inspired by or simply connected to our friend Harry.

Herbert Allingham

[Kinema Comic material from the Digital Files of the Conjuring Arts Research Center.]