Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini
By Sid Fleischman.
I’m a lifelong Sid Fleischman fan. I put him right up there on the tallest taleteller’s platform as a spinner of great American adventure yarns. For my daughters, though, he’s been a hard sell. His books tend to feature young male protagonists. They found the audiobook of Bandit’s Moon too creepy for bedtime.
But Escape! , one of Fleischman’s recent forays into non-fiction (a field he did not enter, other than a series of magic instruction books early in his career and a 1996 autobiography, until just five years ago; score this against his dozens of novels and half a dozen screenplays), grabbed them.
Fleischman writes in the manner of the eras of which he writes. He likes sensational adjectives and blowhard rhapsodizing. Yet he’s also a skeptic, keen to unravel yarns that get out of hand. He’s the perfect biographer for Houdini. A magician himself, he cares about the master’s craft, and notes that Houdini’s innovations were mostly about new methods of presentation rather than new concepts for tricks. He questions the established lore about Houdini’s birth, his relationships with his parents, his ego and his legacy. He does this in a way that makes Houdini’s whole life seem spectacular, even when Fleischer’s reminding you it could be mundane.
I hope to get my daughters interested in Fleischer’s new bio of Chaplin next, then spring novels like Chancy and the Grand Rascal and By the Great Horn Spoon on them. And for my next trick…