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Houdini: Who’s Your Daddy?

Inside Magic Image of Novel Ferret Out by Tim QuinlanHoudini’s father was a ________?

If you answered Rabbi, you may or may not be correct.

If you said, “lawyer,” you may be close.

If you asked, “who is ‘Houdini’?”  You are on the wrong site.

If you whined, “a person is much more than what he does for a living,” you are probably also on the wrong site but because your response evidences so much depth and sensitivity we assume you have lived life of considerable pain and disappointment and would hate to add to the long list of places and people who have rejected you.  You can stay but don’t touch anything.

The Houdini File is publishing a multi-part series on the question of Houdini’s daddy.  It is absolutely fascinating.

The series is a product of The Houdini Birth Research Committee of the Society of American Magicians.  Their task was to “ferret out hard facts about Mayer Samuel Weisz.”

As an aside, we love the phrase “ferret out hard facts” for inducing a wonderful melange of visual imagery.  In fact, our first World War II novel was titled “Ferret Out!” From the dust jacket “Captain Elmo Ferret was a young aviator trained as a crop duster in rural Key West, Florida drafted into Uncle Sam’s Air Corps to put a hurtin’ on a different kind of crop-destroying pest.”

The book sold in the hundreds over a span of fifty years.  In 1999, it hit the New York Times Best Sellers List in the category of “War Fiction – Paperback or Trade – Animal Names” and later was bought by the dozens when magicians realized we included the word “harpsichord” was the eighth word in the second sentence of the first paragraph of each odd-numbered page, and “organ grinder” was in the same position but on even-number pages.  We wrote it to be used in mentalism acts and were occasionally challenged by the restrictions these two words put on our otherwise fluid writing style.  “Dammit, Ferret,” the young ace barked like an organ grinder  . . .” or “”You know me well, GI,” said the harpsichord hottie from Habsburg.”

Check out the Houdini File for the straight dope on something we as magicians should already know.

 

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