"I knew, as everyone knows, that the easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place some one is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death."- Harry Houdini
Daniel
Stashower is a freelance journalist and an award-winning author of such
biographical works as Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
(1999) and The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the
Invention of Murder (2006), but Stashower is probably better known for
several historical crime novels – usually with Harry Houdini as one of the main
protagonists.
I had previously only read Elephants
in the Distance (1989), which is a memorable and excellent standalone about
a reunion of elderly magicians that came with a body count. It's one of those post-GAD
mysteries, read during my pre-blogging days, that suggested that, perhaps, not
everything published after 1960 was complete and utter tripe.
However, I took my sweet time in
returning to Stashower, but the Harry Houdini mysteries have always been in my
peripheral. There was something about the plot descriptions I found intriguing
and captivating. If only I can remember what exactly it was. Oh, yes: the
impossible crimes!
The Floating Lady Murder (2000) is the second of three historical mystery novels about Harry
Houdini, which is book-ended by The Dime Museum Murders (1999) and The
Houdini Specter (2001), but the detective turned out to be Theodore "Dash"
Hardeen – who was Houdini's younger brother and an accomplished escape artist/magician
himself. Interestingly, Hardeen is also the chronicler and therefore assumes
the roles of both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
I picked The Floating Lady Murder
for one simple reason: the seemingly impossible situation sounded epic and
one-of-a-kind!
The book opens in 1898 and Dash, in the
function as Harry's manager, spots a notice in the New York Dramatic Mirror, in
which opportunities are offered with the "Dean of American Magicians,"
Harry Kellar, for the '98-'99 season, but his brother resists on account that "The
Great Houdini is no mere stagehand" or "a simple lackey to be ordered
about." It takes a bit of manipulation from Harry's wife to change his mind
to go to the audition.
Well, they're taken in after helping
subdue an escaped lion, but Houdini's mind is as welcome a presence as his
nerves of steel, because Kellar is staring a problem in the face: he wants to
debut the lifelong dream of his late mentor, "The Wizard of Kalliffa,"
which is the illusion of the floating lady and he came very close a quarter of
century before – except that tragedy intervened and his wife plunged to her
death. Kellar had patiently waited his entire professional career for mechanical
engineering to evolve to the point it would deliver "necessary mechanics"
to complete the trick, but, at the dawn of the twentieth century, there are
rival magicians working on a similar trick. The illusion is far from perfect
(or even complete) and a deadline is looming at the horizon.
A good chunk of the first half of The
Floating Lady Murder consists of Houdini, Dash and Bess being ingrained
into the group and helping to perfect the illusion as they prepare for opening
night. That’s where the trouble really begins.
"Now she is almost beyond our earthly
grasp," echoes the voice of the old magician on opening night, "surely
the gods themselves must watch in wonder as she floats up towards the vault of
heaven," but the astonished audience becomes horrified when something goes
horribly wrong. Everyone watched in horror as the hovering figure "dipped
and tossed" as "though it were a marionette whose strings were being
snapped one by one" and finally the floating lady plummeted seventy-two
feet to her death.
On first appearance, Miss Moore death
seems like a tragic and unfortunate accident, but a post-mortem examination
reveals the presence of water in her lungs and there can only be one conclusion
drawn from that – she drowned in mid-air! It's not an accident, but an impossible crime and a blatant one at that!
First of all, I want to note here that
Stashower crafted a fine and well-characterized historical novel, wonderfully
capturing the spirit of the era, but as a detective story it did not entirely
conform to the basic rules of fair pay. I can forgive Hardeen for withholding the
tell-all clue he found in the newspaper morgue, but I was a bit miffed when I
found out I had been shooed away from the correct explanation for the "aerial
wizardry" that caused the mid-air drowning. There's basically one logical
answer for this apparent miracle, but there's a character who swears that
explanation was as impossible as the situation itself, which made my hope rise
for an original explanation and labor on an intricate solution of myself. However,
the ending revealed that the solution did run along the lines of that one
logical answer and clues to it where not fairly shared with the reader.
It's kind of understandable why Stashower
played those cards close to his chest, because revealing them would've given
the entire game away well before the end, but this blog uses the Golden Age standard and therefore I'm obliged
to nitpick about the fairness of the plot.
However, I will not be deterred from trying the other two books in the Harry Houdini series, which have apparently more traditional locked room problems. So this will be continued!
