Masters of mystery The strange friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini

First meeting in 1920, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Houdini, the famous magician, began a friendship that eventually turned acrimonious over the subject of spiritualism. Disappointed by early attempts to contact deceased family members, the magician embarked on a campaign to reveal spiritualism as a sham that took advantage of the unsuspecting. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, strongly believed that the living could communicate with the dead. Film and music writer Sandford (Steve McQueen: The Biography) offers biographical information on both men, but his main focus is their conflict over the occult. His book joins others about this relationship. Bernard M.L. Ernst and Hereward Carrington's Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship (1932) and Massimo Polidoro's more recent Final Seance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle both explore the subject in depth. Sandford's version successfully synthesizes the earlier works and also uses previously unpublished material. Verdict The results will appeal to fans of both men and readers interested in spiritualism and mystery. The current Sherlock Holmes movie franchise may increase interest.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY Geneseo (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Polanski, 2008, etc.) brings together two fierce yet mutually respectful antagonists on the subject of spiritualism. The title is doubly misleading. The friendship between the most popular author and the greatest illusionist of their time occupies only the middle third of this volume, and the friendship was never all that friendly. The two famous figures, Sandford concedes, enjoyed "a love-hate relationshipthat eventually tilted toward the latter" after only two years in their eventful lives. Doyle's deepening interest in communicating with the dead, which Sandford traces back to at least 1887, the year A Study in Scarlet first appeared, blossomed into firm belief after his son's death of influenza in 1916. Houdini, who described himself to Doyle as "a skeptic, but a seeker after the truth" in a letter he wrote Doyle soon after their correspondence began in 1920, had meanwhile set up shop as a world-class debunker of bogus mediums and their claims to channel astral voices and paranormal phenomena. It was inevitable that the two men--each prodigiously ambitious, persistent and self-confident--should have been drawn to each other. But not even a 1922 sance--in which the two were joined by Doyle's wife, who under their eyes produced 15 pages of automatic writing she claimed to have been inspired by Houdini's late mother--could convince the skeptic. Instead, his dissent from belief in the miracle led to the rupture of a relationship that had been fragile at best. More a double portrait than an account of a friendship, but a fascinating account of an unlikely relationship framed in a good deal of lightly sourced dual biography.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.