THE GHOSTLY DEDUCTION
Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle both loved to test the boundary between the impossible and the improbable. You might say their friendship, based on magic tricks and messages from the dead, was doomed from the start.
NEW FRIENDS
Early in 1920, the celebrated American magician Harry Houdini was on tour in England. He was an expert at card tricks and pulling live rabbits out of hats, but his specialty was freeing himself from sealed boxes in which he had been placed, bound and handcuffed. No one could figure out how Houdini managed his daring escapes.
One of the celebrities who came to see the mystifying American perform was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the British mystery writer. Conan Doyle was as famous as Houdini, thanks to his wildly popular detective stories starring crime solver Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur’s admirers may have assumed that he, like the brainy sleuth he had created, was committed to keen observation, hard evidence, and logical reasoning.
If so, they were wrong. Conan Doyle believed in fairies, ghosts, haunted houses, and
