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Houdini Speaks Out

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Harry Houdini is a legendary stage magician whose legacy and influence have served to inspire practitioners of legerdemain down to the present day. Although very well known as a magician and as an escape artist, over time people have largely forgotten that he was also a believer in an after life and an exposure of fraudulent mediums who tended to prey on a gullible public. "Houdini Speaks Out: "I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!" by Arthur Moses recreates Houdini's 'solitarian' lectures which he gave from 1922 to his unexpected and early death in 1926. Each of the fifty glass lantern slides he used to highlight his lectures are recreated and carefully matched to his original lecture text. Also available in a hardcover edition (9781425767433, $79.99) "Houdini Speaks Out" is a very strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library collections -- and should be considered mandatory reading by anyone with an interest in spiritualism, magic, and the occult.

I am a magician myself and have read much about Houdini in my life. This book is not a biography but instead a recreation of a lecture HH gave in the last few years of his life - debunking spiritualists. For those of us familiar with this part of his life, the book is very interesting as it shows us slides we had not seen before and parts of the actual lecture. It also provides a good overview of HH's work in this area by giving other background of his work against fakers. Remarkably, in spite of the clear showings in the 1920s by HH that nobody receives messages from the dead, today in the USA a very large percentage of adults think it is possible to receive messages from the beyond. If HH were here today, he would be on tv debunking the ghost hunters on the sci fi channel and John Edwards among others with vigor. Too bad we don't have someone with his level of passion and effort to carry on.

I have read few bíographies about Houdini. This one I bought because of lantern slide photos it represent, Houdini used these lantern slides in his lectures about spiritualism. All the pictures in this book are perfect, interesting and beautiful (if I may use word beautiful when talking about Houdini...). Addition to lantern slides there are more photos, copies of handbills etc. Nice work.

Arthur did a fantastic job on this book. If you are interested in Houdini and Houdini research, this is a valuable edition to have and well done. It seems a bit specialized as the focus is Houdini's magic lantern slide show given at the end of his Spirit Fraud lectures but also Arthur has published the wonderful pictures from a set of the glass slides that Houdini used in his show - nice stuff. I highly recommend this book should you have an interest in this material and the rare photos. -- In spring 2008 #1 issue of Skeptic Magazine you can read my article on Houdini's Spirit Expose Show with Houdini's show reveiwed and spoken quotes of Houdini during the show largely used.

- Steve Rivkin

Houdini's career was going into a slump as he approached 50. His escapes were becoming too strenuous for him and the audiences had become jaded regarding his "death-defying" feats. Vaudeville itself was suffering from increasing competition from radio and the movies. Houdini then, like other magicians, switched to exposing fraudulent spirit mediums for half of his show in order to bring in paying audiences.
Like magician and non-magician exposers from the beginning of the Spiritualist movement in 1848, the stage exposures were often the performer's version of what happened, not an actual exposure under the same conditions as in the seance room. The audiences for the most part had never been to a seance and so accepted the performer's statements as likely true.
For all of Houdini's loudly declared animosity toward fraudulent mediums and how he only wanted to save the "defenseless gullible public" from the fraud, Houdini needed the mediums to bring in the paying audience -- consequently he could not risk actually shutting down the mediums, only antagonizing and publicizing them.
Arthur Moses has performed a real service to magic and spiritualist history in publishing the slides and patter used by Houdini in his lectures. Moses also provides a potted biography of Houdini as background. The book is well illustrated with a good introductory bibliography.
The Moses note on Slide 19, however, is incorrect regarding Stuart Cumberland. Charles Garner was not apprenticed to Washington Irving Bishop (he worked as secretary for Bishop for about six weeks before Bishop left for Malta). Garner learned the muscle-reading act on his own after having seen the money that Bishop was making. He then took a more socially euphonious name,Stuart Charles Francis Cumberland, and went on to make over five million dollars as a mind reader, journalist and author. Cumberland was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1887.
Cumberland did perform medium exposures along the lines of Houdini et al, and was embarrassed on more than one occasion when he could not explain the phenomena, resorting to fairly limp explanations that were publicly disputed by others present. He failed to expose A. H. Philips, the first medium he took on when he came to New York for the first time in 1881 when two reporters from two different NY papers he had taken with him claimed that Cumberland had not in fact exposed anything.
Cumberland died February, 1922, two years after the photograph in the slide was taken at the stage door of the London Palladium. Dr. Irving was a dentist from Australia, and an avid lover of magic.
On the whole, a useful book.