In Houdini's Box, psychotherapist Adam Phillips weaves reflections on Houdini's life and career in with sketches of patients whose problems can be viewed as variations on the theme of escape. The author Phillips focuses on another aspect of Houdini's career that is covered in these pages of the Psychic Investigator - his near-obsession with exposing mediums as charlatans, a campaign that cost him the friendship of an inveterate believer, Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was no stranger to setting up uncanny tricks and then deconstructing them (in, for example, those wonderful interludes in the Sherlock Holmes stories when the detective confounds Dr. Watson by inferring the origin, occupation and recent history of a new client from nearly imperceptible clues), but his gullibility had been seeded by the death of a son in the World War I - a loss he sought to consol by attemting communication with the son's spirit.

    According to this new book on Houdini, Harry the Skeptic was a kind of absolutist. He writes:

"Everyone he could expose was a fake, and he was the real thing because there was no one who could expose him; as if it would take a Houdini to unmask a Houdini. And perhaps the real thing - the real thing for a secular age- was neither to claim nor to invoke psychic phenomena, but only human skills simply beyond disproof. For Houdini the silence of the dead - that the living and the dead are out of reach of each other - was inescapable. Everything else was up for grabs."

    There is enough legerdemain here for psychic investigators everywhere, and those who wish to dive deeper into this facinating battle between Doyle & Houdini should track down Kenneth Silverman's Houdin!!!, The Career of Ehrich Weiss and Daniel Stashowers Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle.) For a more trendy book full of gender studies about Houdini, try Houdin, Tarzan, And the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America.