St. Martin's Press

forced to appeal to the Milwaukee Hebrew Relief Society for coal to see them through the winter. Ehrich

Legend insists that Ehrich opened his first lock while in pursuit of a piece of pie secured in Cecilia’s kitchen cupboard. It’s known that one afternoon in October 1883, when he was nine, he earned 35¢ by making his debut as a trapeze artist called “The Prince of the Air” in a Milwaukee circus, and that he later gave a series of impromptu performances around town in which he demonstrated his ability to bend over backward and pick up a pin from the floor with his teeth, among other feats of physical agility

Ehrich was on the premises one day in the summer of 1885 when a policeman came through the door escorting a fearsome-looking man in shackles. The man had just been found not guilty in a court hearing, but somehow the key had broken off in the lock of his handcuffs, “and judging from his language, which was ripe, he wasn’t happy about it.” Seizing the moment, the eleven-year-old produced a thumbnail-sized metal buttonhook from his pocket, worked it around inside the lock, and snapped open the cuffs within a minute.

The assumption is that it had a major impact on his developing character, apparently making him “neurotically guilty” and “determined to do even better,” to “make up the loss to his parents.”

In November 1890, Ehrich saw a small newspaper article about the pioneering French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–71). He

I felt being an illusionist was a very lonely business,” he wrote in an 1870 letter. To counter this, Robert-Houdin had begun to develop a more flamboyant style, culminating in a series of exhibitions he called the Soirées Fantastiques, held in Paris in 1845. These revolutionized the art and practice of magic at a stroke, giving it something close to its modern flavor of gaudily packaged sorcery as performed by a stand-up comedian. Instead of the traditional, “rather solemn” presentation

The highlight of the show, which they performed as many as fifteen times a day (while earning only a dollar a week, after expenses), was an effect they called “Metamorphosis.” The basic idea was that Harry would be tied in a sack and securely locked in a steamer trunk, which members of the audience would be invited on stage to padlock and truss with heavy ropes.

Mayer Weiss was sixty-three and left behind a widow and six surviving children, the youngest of whom was just ten. Harry is said to have taken his mother aside and tearfully promised her that one day he would shower her in gold. He was eighteen years old and, for a ferociously driven individual, not getting very far very fast. He seemed headed for a hard, ill-paid life as a shop worker and occasional magician

Walter Franklin Prince, wrote, “He gave up Judaism, but the fervor with which he carried on his anti-Spiritalistic propaganda, not publicly only but in private conversation, was to me so striking, that I once told him that the preaching zeal of his fathers had descended to him, only it was turned in another direction. It was his religion.”

Conan Doyle seemed to become not only increasingly convinced of his cause, but obsessed with the idea that there was a well-organized conspiracy among his enemies to suppress the truth. It was all a “very deadly plot,” he wrote of one case, before complaining that Houdini