december, 2006

Evidently this book is the author's (Gabriel Brownstein) first novel, but you'd never know it as you read it. The setting is New York in the early 1920s, and opens with two famous celebrities, Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle. It's the birthday of one of ACD's children, and Houdini is performing antics in the sea. However, once we get past the niceties of family life here, we find that Houdini and Doyle are involved in a very public argument over the supernatural...and not just in general. It seems that Doyle has discovered a medium who he feels is genuine and Houdini, the champion of protecting the public against spiritual fraud, doesn't agree. As luck would have it, a young reporter from a nothing newspaper called The Radio Times, who is there to write a story for the personalities section, and becomes a central figure later in this debate.

I won't go into details here, but the writing is fresh, the historical details are incredible and Brownstein writes one story at surface level but produces something altogether different by the time the reader has finished the novel. If you read it solely for the Houdini/Doyle debate, you'll miss the real story underneath.

I recommend this one to readers who want something new, or to readers (like me) who are interested in Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, the realm of spiritualism or historical fiction.