More Than an Entertainer

Regrets at the death of houdini would not be so deep as they are had he been only a man who by his tricks and mystifications and astonishing feats furnished clean entertainment to millions of people. He was much more than that, as the public has been slowly finding out.

He was, for one thing, an eager and profound student of morbid psychology. The literature of imposture was familiar to him. In recent years he took an active and useful part in detecting and exposing fraudulent performers who professed to produce spiritualistic phenomena. That there is a mental borderland where strange psychic susceptibilities manifest themselves in a way to eliminate conscious fraud houdini did not deny. But he was unsparing and highly successful in challenging all kinds of false pretense in this sphere.

Far beyond the arts of the prestidigitator, which so greatly aided houdini in running down men who made a claim to supernatural powers, did his interests extend. He was a man of wide reading, a collector both of books and of art. It was doubtless this broad cultivation of the man, in all his varied faculties, that made him so accomplished and virtually unrivaled in his specialty.

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