Espionage then was still a gentlemen's game, and under the cover of accepting escape challenges Houdini could easily case German munitions factories. They speculate that Houdini was a secret agent working for the fledgling U.S. Then Kalush and Sloman go one better and argue that in his life too there was far more to the Master Illusionist than met the eye. No, they posit, Houdini didn't die (on October 31, 1926) from appendicitis (much less on stage during a failed escape, as an urban legend has it) he was murdered. Their magnum opus (592 tightly written pages without references, which are available separately on a website) is the result, they say, of two years spent scouring archive after archive, including all 17,000 pages of Houdini's scrapbooks and thousands of his letters.

In their biography, Kalush, a professional magician, and Sloman, a writer, attempt to reveal Houdini's unknown persona. His biographies, biopics and internet tribute sites abound, yet do we know who he really was? Not according to William Kalush and Larry Sloman.

Erik Weisz, the Hungarian-born son of a rabbi and soap maker, would turn himself into the world's most famous illusionist

Harry houdini mayer samuel weisz