Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and renowned illusionist Harry Houdini were once fast friends who admired each other’s work. They met in London in 1920 during the magician’s tour of England.
Conan Doyle and Houdini were an unlikely pair. Doyle was a Scottish Victorian gentleman, educated at a Catholic private school. Houdini was a self-educated Hungarian immigrant to the US who had spent most of his life in vaudeville. They both shared an interest in spiritualism.
When Doyle’s son, Kingsley, was killed in the First World War, he became a devout believer in life after death and became a tireless missionary for spiritualism. Doyle donated the equivalent of millions of pounds in today’s money trying to prove that the dead were all around us and eager to speak to living people.
Houdini desired to communicate beyond the grave with his mother but knew too much about the trickery and fakery of the stage to be easily convinced. Early in his career, before he found fame as an escape artist, Houdini, and his wife, Bess, were not above drawing on their theatrical skills to give public seances on the vaudeville circuit to feed themselves.
It was Houdini’s public campaign to expose fraudulent mediums who he described as “human leeches” that led to a rift between the two men.
Conan Doyle, a medical doctor and the creator of the great rationalist, Sherlock Holmes, might seem unlikely to fall for the claims of mediums. But from the mid-19th century onwards, spiritualism had a widespread following both in the UK and across the Atlantic.
Doyle’s wife, Jean, became a self-proclaimed medium and purveyor of automatic writing. But after Jean attempted to contact Houdini’s mother during a private seance in a hotel in Atlantic City in 1922, the two men’s relationship began to disintegrate. Jean said she had made contact with Houdini’s mother.
Houdini subsequently publicly announced that he did not believe that the 15 pages of grammatical English were a genuine message from beyond the grave—probably because the handwritten message was in English, and his mother didn’t speak English.
After Houdini’s death, his widow, Bess, held a yearly seance, hoping that her husband might make contact and give her a message using a prearranged code. He never made contact and 10 years later, she gave up.
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Frank Victoria is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He’s been an Amazon bestseller with his recent book, The Founders’ Plot, a political thriller for our times. He donates proceeds of his books to Tunnels to Towers and Fisher House, helping military veterans and first responders. His novella, The Ultimate Bet is available on his website and Amazon. Check out his new website: FrankVictoriaAuthor.com
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