Harry Houdini’s first mass-market book, The Right Way to Do Wrong, used well-established rhetorical routines to exploit public interest in criminals and prisoners.^ Houdini’s book was published in 1906. Houdini was then performing escapes from police stations and jails in conjunction with touring Benjamin F. (B. F.) Keith’s circuit of vaudeville theaters. The Right Way to Do Wrong seemed to allude to escaping from punishment for doing wrong. An interview with Houdini in January, 1906, in Keith’s Theatre News, which B. F. Keith published, pointed to that possibility:

“You would give the police a tough time if you should turn criminal.”

“There’s no doubt about that,” {Houdini} said with a smile. “However, there is no danger. I make all the money I want honestly.”^

The Right Way to Do Wrong seemed to offer to others the knowledge and skill that Houdini possessed. Unlike Houdini, others might feel that they are unable to make all the money they wanted honestly. But Houdini advised:

IT DOES NOT PAY TO LEAD A DISHONEST LIFE, and to those who read this book, although it will inform them “The Right Way to Do Wrong,” all I have to say is one word and that is “DON’T.”

Why then publish The Right Way to Do Wrong? The book claimed that its purpose was to promote public safety:

to safeguard the public against the practices of the criminal classes by exposing their various tricks and explaining the adroit methods by which they seek to defraud. “Knowledge is power” is an old saying. I might paraphrase it in this case by saying knowledge is safety.

Houdini further explained:

In this book I have told of the methods of criminals, and held them up to your gaze, not as heroes, but as malefactors; not as examples to be emulated, but as corruptions to be shunned, as you would shun a plague.

Encouraging oneself or others to explore vices in order to gain knowledge about evil others or to learn what to avoid is a common trick of verbal distancing. You show me a salacious photo and say, “Look at what others are looking at!” I enjoy a long look and respond, “That’s terrible. How could they do that?” To serve those seeking a more straightforward vicarious thrill, Houdini included a small advertisement:

As this book is not a history of crime or criminals, to those wishing to read positive facts of great criminals…I can safely call attention to the book called “Our Rival the Rascal!” written by my friend Chief Inspector of Police, Wm. B. Watts, of Boston, Mass. This book is the greatest book on the subject that I have ever seen.^

Accounts of criminals and crime have been at the center of the historical development of mass media. Houdini’s book is squarely within that genre of public discourse.

Houdini represented crime and criminals primarily through already publicized stories, conventional descriptions of criminal crime-types, emotional clichés, and hearsay. In the second paragraph of The Right Way to Do Wrong, Houdini declared:

You who live your life in placid respectability know but little of the real life of the denizens of this world. …Of the real thoughts and feelings of the criminal, of the terrible fascination which binds him to his nefarious career, of the thousands – yea, tens of thousands, of undiscovered crimes and unpunished criminals, you know but little.

The imperative to know the truth — “the real thoughts and feelings of the criminal” — plays out here in the field of attention-seeking public representations such as “the terrible fascination which binds him to his nefarious career.” Houdini described a burglar in theatrical disguise (“a specially made wig, with false side-whiskers and a moustache of the best quality”) and a burglar walking backwards to disguise his tracks. He described “a smart young married couple” living in “a smart little villa in one of the suburbs” while the husband led a double life as a pathetic beggar:

One arm hung helpless by his side, his head hung with the weakness of paralysis. His right leg was paralyzed, and he laboriously dragged it after him. No one on earth would have supposed a connection between the crippled match-seller, always so grateful for alms, and the snug suburban home.

Houdini then declared: “nine times out of time – yes, ninety-nine times out of one hundred – every coin that goes into the tin cup or the hand of a street beggar goes to a fraud of the worst description.” Houdini quoted criminals based on what he heard from detectives, used descriptions taken directly from books and newspapers, and described famous crimes and criminals. Houdini also drew upon the burgeoning scholarly literature of criminal anthropology:

The ordinary criminal’s hand has a peculiar rough shape, the thumb being very plump and short, while the fingers are uneven and heavy. The small finger is turned inward, and bluntness is the hand’s chief characteristic.^

Houdini’s description of criminals aren’t empirical observations. They are a mélange of established public representations.

Houdini’s accounts of crime follow conventions of attention-seeking public stories. The plot is simple, and the narrative emphasizes character and feelings:

The wayward youth sees only the advantage to be gained by unlawful acts. He does not see the years of ignominy, the furtive hiding from the law, the shame of not being able to look his fellow-man in the face – no, nor the inevitable arrest, conviction, and punishment which ends it all in ninety-nine cases out of every one hundred.

According to Houdini, “great criminals” have had a uniform fate:

all of them have either died in the poorhouse or are yet counting the weary days in prison cells, divorced from wife, from children, and from all ties that human beings hold so dear.

Houdini described prisoners as disgraced and ruining their families with shame:

Disgraced, they are ruined for life, often ruining all their family. It is a terrible thing to have the finger of fate point at you with the remark, “His father is serving time for doing so and so,” or “Her brother is now in his sixteenth year, and comes out in five years.”^

While families of prisoners may be subject to social censure, the actual hardship of prisoners’ families primarily concerns loss of communication with the prisoner and lose of personal and material support from the prisoner. Disgrace, which primarily is public status in relation to elite (socially graceful) society, has little significance in most persons’ ordinary communication.

Houdini’s attempt to meet with a disgraced prisoner failed. In The Right Way to Do Wrong, Houdini noted:

Thanksgiving, 1905, during my engagement at Keith’s Theatre, I gave a performance for the prisoners in the country jail in Cleveland.

Held in the Cleveland Jail at that time was forger and swindler Cassie Chadwick, known as the “Duchess of Diamonds” and the “Queen of Ohio.” On March 10, 1905, after a trial that attracted enormous publicity, Chadwick was convicted of conspiracy to bankrupt the Citizen’s National Bank of Oberlin, Ohio. Posing as the illegitimate daughter of the business tycoon Andrew Carnegie, Chadwick had received a $800,000 loan from the Citizen’s National Bank and between $10 million and $20 million in total in loans from various banks. Houdini’s interest in entertaining the prisoners in Cleveland Jail probably was related to Chadwick’s presence there. Chadwick, however, balked:

Mrs. Chadwick was to be entertained in her cell; but fifteen minutes before I was to show her a few conjuring tricks, she changed her mood, gave the jailer an argument, and refused to allow any one near her cell.^

Houdini’s relation to criminals and prisoners was show business. Chadwick, who like Houdini was an expert in manipulating public perceptions, apparently decided not to allow Houdini to exploit her fame to create publicity for himself.

Harry Houdini had an extraordinarily close relationship with his mother. Houdini’s father brought his family, including Houdini, from Hungary to the U.S. in the 1870s. Houdini’s father struggled to find and hold work as a rabbi. Through a childhood of poverty and marginal social status, Houdini came to view his mother as “a figure of transcendent love and selfless devotion,” an “angel.” Houdini considered himself to be a “mothers-boy.” One biographer noted:

Houdini would claim throughout his life a special relationship to her, as, apparently, she did to him. …she would insist that even as a baby, he never cried. If he started to fret, she would hold him to her breast, and the sound of her heartbeat soothed him. Well into his adult life, Houdini and his mother would gratify each other by reenacting this embrace.^

As an adult, Houdini described his mother as “the guiding beacon of my life.” Houdini wore only clothes that his mother had picked out for him.^ He delighted in bringing her to see his performances. He acknowledged, “if I do anything, I say to myself I wonder if Ma would want me to do this?”^

Even after twenty years of marriage, Houdini’s wife did not outrank his mother in his expressed affections. Houdini described his mother and his wife Bess as “My two Sweet-hearts.” In 1904, after he achieved financial success, Houdini bought a home in the German section of Harlem. He lived in that home with his wife Bess and his German-speaking mother until his mother’s death in 1913 at age seventy-two.^

Houdini suffered greatly from news of his mother’s death. In the course of his career as a performer, Houdini had added death-defying feats to his handcuff and prison escapes. Amid a press conference in Denmark after performing for an audience that included members of the Danish royal family, Houdini received a cable informing him of his mother’s death. He fainted. He regained consciousness sobbing, “Mother – my dear little mother – poor little mama.”^ Houdini later wrote, “I who have laughed at the terrors of death, who have smilingly leaped from high bridges, received a shock {from his mother’s death} from which I do not think recovery is possible.”^

Houdini apparently insisted that his mother not be buried immediately, as was Jewish custom. Upon receiving news of his mother’s death, Houdini broke his European performance contract and returned immediately by ship to New York. Twelve days after his mother’s death, Houdini was at her body’s side in their home in New York.^ He stayed there all night. His mother was buried the next day. In the weeks after her death, Houdini rarely left their house other than to visit her grave:

He visited his mother’s grave every day and also every night at fifteen minutes past midnight, the instant of her death. He lay flat on the ground, his arms embracing her grave, his face pressed close to the earth. There he talked to her, begging her to let him know her last words.^

Houdini was still lying down next to his mother’s grave and speaking into the earth to her a year after her death. Houdini also gathered all the letters he had received from his mother:

He had them transcribed in “good German,” typed out, and put in book form so he could read them easily. Each letter, he observed in his diary, was “a love story, a prayer to God to protect her children, a plea that we should be good human beings.” In gathering and reading them he shed, he said, “many a bitter tear.”^

In burial instructions that he wrote in 1915 and re-initialed in 1916 and 1921, Houdini declared:

It is my wish that all of my Darling Beloved Mothers letters also the 2 enclosed letters, shall be placed in a sort of black bag, and used as a pillow for my head in my coffin, and all to be buried with me.^

Grave goods have been found in human burials from about 14,000 years ago through to the present in a wide variety of cultures. Personal letters from a dead relative are, however, a rather unusual grave good.

Houdini expressed in many ways the loss he felt from his mother’s death. Houdini used black-bordered stationary to indicate his mourning. He also sold the Harlem house where he had lived with her. He explained, “the Home is a Home no longer for me and must be disposed of.” Extravagantly celebrating Mother’s Day, Houdini contacted the daughter of the woman who founded the commemoration, collected Mother’s Day decorative sayings (“every day is mother’s day for me”) and on one Mother’s Day sent flowers to the graves of all the mothers he knew.^ His wife Bess would wake at night to hear Houdini calling out to his mother. According to one biographer, “Bess believed that he was never the same man after the death of his mother; the old vitality was gone.”^ Houdini wrote to his brother:

Am hoping that eventually I will have my burning tears run dry, but know that my Heart will ALWAYS ACHE FOR OUR DARLING MOTHER. …my very Existence seems to have expired with HER…I feel as if my heart of hearts went with HER.

About sixteen months after his mother’s death, Houdini recorded in his diary his loneliness and his longing to die and be with her again:

Here I am left alone on the station, bewildered and not knowing when the next train comes along so that I can join my mother.^

Houdini – the magician, the handcuff king, the jail breaker, the escape artist, the daredevil – was painfully bound by his mother’s death.

Houdini’s communication about his mother went beyond generic conventions. Houdini authored a mass-market book in 1924.^ An optional, conventional component of a book is a dedication. Dedications typically consist of a name and occasionally a relationship description. Houdini dedicated his book to his mother with extravagant praise and capital letters:

Houdini went on to declare in the preface:

I believe in a Hereafter and no greater blessing could be bestowed upon me than the opportunity, once again, to speak to my sainted Mother who awaits me with open arms to press me to her heart in welcome, just as she did when I entered this mundane sphere.

These words powerfully express desire for communion. Houdini included this intensely personal communication within a mass-market book.

Harry Houdini’s intense grief over his mother’s death did not create his interest in spiritual communication with the dead. Houdini’s mother died on July 17, 1913. Houdini as an adult had an extraordinarily close relationship with his mother. He acutely felt the lose of her presence. Houdini’s interest in spiritualism, however, long predated his mother’s death. Houdini actively sought public attention for debunking spiritualists only long after his mother’s death. Personal grief had little relevance to Houdini’s engagement with spiritualists.

Houdini regarded spiritualist as illegitimate illusionist competitors. In a mass-market book Houdini authored in 1906, Houdini stated:

Spiritualism has many followers, and at one time I was almost a believer, but this was before I made a thorough investigation, which I have followed up even to the present day. I have never seen a materialization or a manifestation which I cannot fully explain. …

Spiritualism is really a beautiful belief for those that are honest and believe in it; but as I have visited the greatest spiritualistic meetings in the world, I am sorry to say that no one has ever produced anything for me that would smack of the spiritual. …

In the future, I contemplate writing a book on spiritualistic methods, and how they do their tricks. I do not mean genuine spiritualists who have no tricks, but those mediums who use their knowledge of magic to gain a living.^

Houdini began his career earning a meager living as an undistinguished magician doing card tricks and other illusions, including the sensational bullet catch. What differentiated Houdini from spiritualists?

Houdini extensively studied the possibility of communicating with the dead. In the introduction to his book, A Magician Among the Spirits (1924), Houdini noted:

It is this question as to the truth or falsity of intercommunication between the dead and the living, more than anything else, that has claimed my attention and to which I have devoted years of research and conscientious study. …

During my last trip abroad, in 1919, I attended over one hundred séances with the sole purpose of honest investigation; these séances were presided over by well-known mediums in France and England. …

During the last thirty years I have read every single piece of literature on the subject of Spiritualism that I could. I have accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, Spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc….

In contrast to the natural human tendency, particularly among grief-stricken persons, to communicate with the dead, Houdini insisted that such communication must meet particular standards of proof, such as test conditions and expert, objective observers. It was not enough for communication with the dead to be possible only in personal, subjective experience. Houdini insisted that communication with the dead must be validated as public knowledge.

Houdini found no evidence of communication with the dead. He stated:

after twenty-five years of ardent research and endeavor I declare that nothing has been revealed to convince me that intercommunication has been established between the Spirits of the departed and those still in the flesh.

Houdini’s investigations indicated that claimed instances of communication with the dead were merely human effects:

everything I have investigated has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.^

Such human activity was not consistent with public knowledge in twentieth-century America. Houdini thus judged communication with the dead to be fraudulent.

Consider, for example, one attempt to communicate with the dead. Arthur Conan Doyle, aware of Houdini’s intense longing for his dead mother, arranged for his wife, who claimed to be a medium, to attempt to contact Houdini’s mother through “automatic writing.” Houdini’s father, a Jewish rabbi from Hungary, believed in life after death, and so did Houdini. Houdini concentrated intensely and sought success. Lady Doyle, rapping her hand repeatedly on the table to indicate contact, drew a Christian cross on the paper and began to rapidly scribble banalities in English. Houdini’s mother did not speak English. As a poor, Jewish immigrant, Houdini’s mother undoubtedly had a much different style of expression than Lady Doyle. Houdini concluded that this alleged communication was not just delusion and deception, but an even more troubling indication of “religious mania.”^

Houdini felt that spiritual activities ruined the life of John W. Edmonds, an eminent nineteenth-century prison reformer. Houdini noted Edmonds’ grief over his wife’s death. Houdini then described Edmonds’ fall:

One midnight he seemed to hear the voice of his {dead} wife speaking a sentence to him. It was his doom. He started as though shot and from that time on devoted all his time, money, and energy to Spiritualism.

Houdini explicitly related himself to Edmonds:

He {Edmonds} died April 5^th, 1874 (the very date of my birth). I doubt if the history of Spiritualism can point out a man of greater brilliancy who ruined his life following up this “will-o-the-wisp” to relieve his grief.^

Although Houdini didn’t turn to spiritualist communication in his grief over his mother’s death, that wasn’t because he lacked personal capacity for fantasy. Houdini actually was born on March 24, 1874. In a letter to his brother after his mother’s death, Houdini explained the date on which he would celebrate his birthday:

always APRIL 6^th. It hurts me to think I cant talk it over with Darling Mother and as SHE always wrote me on April 6^th, that will be my adopted birthdate.^

Houdini shifted his birthday one day more in relating himself to Edmonds. The public record of Houdini’s birth remained secure, although it went unexamined until decades after his death. Like much personal communication, Houdini’s own declaration of his birthday had little public importance.

Houdini began publicly exposing spiritualists as frauds in 1922. In October, 1922, Houdini authored an article, “Ghosts that Talk — By Radio” in Popular Radio magazine. The article included a fabricated exposé of an unnamed medium’s use of a radio receiver hidden in a tea kettle to produce a talking tea kettle. The article outraged magicians, who complained that Houdini had improperly exposed a trick.^ Houdini also occasionally gave learned lectures on spiritualism, e.g. “Spiritualist Phenomena and the Psychology of Deception Among Fraudulent Mediums.” By this time the only magician whose professional success exceeded Houdini’s was Howard Thurston.^ At the Society of American Magician’s banquet in October, 1922, Thurston and Houdini gave opposing speeches on spiritualism.^

In early 1924, Houdini intensified his efforts to build a business as a debunker of spiritualists and media. Houdini was then about fifty years old. His recent attempts to develop a film business featuring himself had failed. Houdini pivoted to the intellectual business of battling spiritualists. In January, 1924, Houdini secured a spot on a committee, sponsored by prestigious magazine Scientific American, to investigate spiritualists. In February, 1924, he signed on with the Coit-Alber Chautauqua Company as a lecturer on spiritualism and fraudulent mediums. He then set off on a twenty-four town, twenty-four lecture tour ranging from Ohio to Florida. That spring Houdini also nominally authored a book exposing spiritualists, A Magician Among the Spirit. In addition, he nominally authored two short stories on fake spiritualists for a popular magazine. Houdini did another eight-week lecture tour on fraudulent mediums in October and November, 1924. Houdini’s lecturing, publishing, and scientific work provided rich opportunities for cross-promotion.^

While spiritualists exploited popular demand for personal communication with the dead, Houdini the magician provided mass-market entertainment. Houdini set up a network of undercover agents to investigate spiritualists. The summary reports of one who investigated about three hundred mediums probably provide a fair description of the business:

Her summaries paint a tired world of furnished rooms and back parlors, where for a dollar or two handed to some Reverend Odessa Champlain, the spirits of dead infants and faithless fathers relayed twenty minutes of clarification, advice, and solace: The baby died of throat trouble; Do not marry a Catholic; I am happy and with father.^

Spiritualists usually didn’t broadcast communication with the dead. They mainly provided communication between family and friends, ordinary communication except for one party being dead. The telephone industry, which began growing rapidly in the U.S. in 1895, provided a similar personal communication service between living persons. The first experience of a telephone call was probably more astonishing to many persons than was communication with the dead.

Houdini’s after-death communication spectacle illustrates that Houdini’s show business was much different from ordinary communication with family and friends. Before his death, Houdini arranged to attempt to deliver a coded message to his wife Bess after his death. In Hollywood on Halloween in 1936, the year of the tenth anniversary of Houdini’s death, a nationally broadcasted séance on the roof of a Hollywood hotel attempted to communicate with Houdini. Attending were “200 persons, including newspaper men, newsreel crews and the attendants for a temporary radio station.” Despite calls to him on a powerful public address system, Houdini did not deliver the message. Bess then declared that she did not believe that Houdini could come back to her or to anyone. She turned out the light burning in front of his picture, and declared, “It is finished. Good night, Harry.” Subsequently explaining that she did not believe in the possibility of communicating with the dead, Bess declared, “Ten years is long enough to wait for any man.” Passing on a specific message, particularly as part of an extraordinary public spectacle, is not ordinary communication with family and friends, even dead ones.

Houdini and other magicians used mastery of public knowledge to differentiate their activities from activities like spiritualists’ communicating with dead relatives. Spiritualist mediums were persons with special capabilities of unknown origin. The communication services that they provided could not be explained with authoritative, public knowledge. Houdini, in contrast, emphasized his mastery of public knowledge:

“My mind,” he {Houdini} is often quoted as having said, “is the key that sets me free.” The magician informed and developed that mind through intensive reading; as he did so, he built a formidable library. When, in the 1920s, Houdini strode into the public arena to confront fraudulent mediums, he proceeded from an inner fortress lined with books and manuscripts.^

Houdini described himself as living in a library. He measured the size of his library against that of leading theatrical libraries around the world. Houdini also authored books documenting and analyzing magic across a huge historical and topical scope. He ultimately donated his library to the Library of Congress. Houdini’s magic developed from well-established channels of public knowledge. It potentially was accessible to everyone.

Public status, rather than the individual mind, was the key to modern magic. Magic that could be satisfactorily explained with authoritative public knowledge, but wasn’t, counted as authentic (modern) magic. Magicians sought to prevent exposure of such magic. Spiritual activities that claimed to be based on mysterious powers separate from public knowledge counted as fraud. Houdini and others vigorously sought to expose such magic, particularly when it attracted significant public attention. The Society of American Magicians (SAM) set some relevant professional guidelines:

Basically it proposed that Spiritualist manifestations used by magicians should be considered magic tricks, and not exposed; Spiritualist manifestations produced in darkness that could not be produced in the light, might be exposed without penalty.^

The Superintendent of the United States Jail in Washington, D.C., attesting to Houdini’s amazing, unprecedented, and mysterious escape, showed awareness of this distinction. He noted, “Mr. Houdini impressed his audience as a gentleman and an artist who does not profess to do the impossible.”^

Public deliberation favored Houdini’s magic over spiritualist communication. Public deliberation abstracts from personal interests and favors communication that is publicly accessible. Houdini’s magic was publicly accessible entertainment. Spiritualist communication was mainly personal communication not meant to be meaningful to a broad audience. Houdini’s magic displayed the value of public knowledge and technical skill by challenging spectators to explain tricks through normal means. Houdini’s magic worked within the public knowledge that orders public deliberation. Spiritualists claimed to use special personal powers that authoritative public knowledge could not explain. Spiritualist communication began from outside the boundaries of public deliberation.