HOUDINI TO THE RESCUE!

Best guy in the world to talk you off a ledge.                                                                   (via laist.com)

Did you ever hear about the time Harry saved one of the world's most famous writers from self-destruction?

Me neither, until I got into the exploits of Sax Rohmer, creator of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

I hate to keep trashing the Houdini biographers, who are after all an intrepid lot. But the more you read the bios the less you find. And the more you search elsewhere, the more great Houdini stories turn up that the biographers completely ignore.

Sax Rohmer credits his friend Harry with saving his literary butt, going far above and beyond the calls of duty or friendship. For details, read on.

It was winter, 1920. Rohmer had a lucrative contract with Collier's magazine to deliver an 80,000 word mystery story. He was holed up in his apartment on Bruton Street in London, writing like mad. 

Picadilly Circus c. 1920

He was writing as fast as he could because he had debts to pay. Even though he was one of the most famous and highest-paid writers on earth, he had exotic tastes and spent money like water. (Note the dollar sign on his signature below.)

Sax in his study                                        (via Sax Rohmer Site/www.njedge.net)

"Rohmer decided to describe a seemingly impossible murder and then solve it as he continued to write," says Prof. Lawrence Knapp, who tends the Sax Rohmer website on the Internet. 

"By the end of the third chapter, he realized he had no solution and gave up. Meanwhile his agent had sold the story to Collier's for serialization and the first chapter had already been printed. Sax travelled to New York and holed up in a hotel to try and find a solution. He kept writing but could think of no way out."

Harry loved exotic pets, as did Bazarada, the Rohmer character based on Houdini.

Enter his friend Harry Houdini to save the day. Literally. Rohmer described it vividly in a column he wrote for the Manchester News in 1938. Here's the concluding extract:

THE WIZARD'S WAY OUT

    At this point, enter Houdini...

    If I was worried about my contract, and Heaven knows I was -- the reputation of one of the leading magazines in the United States was wholly in my keeping -- Harry Houdini was deeply concerned about me.

    He insisted upon certain hours of relaxation, almost literally carrying me from the building at times.

    He took me to meet interesting people. He made parties to amuse me.

    I ate Thanksgiving dinner at his hospitable board in the old house which harboured the wonderful library. I wore a tweed suit over pyjamas, for he would take no refusal.

    I suppose in fact that I was fairly near the cracking point when Houdini offered me the solution of the mystery!

    Unannounced, he appeared one night when I was pacing the floor on the verge of desperation. The door opened, and he was there!

    He carried a copy of the magazine in which that installment including Chapter Three had appeared.

    I had not told him of the piece of dialogue which, had it never been printed, would have enabled me to save the situation; in the circumstances I had thought that to do so would be useless.

    But he had read every line of the story, approaching it as he would have approached a problem of escape from a locked box.

    Now he opened the pages and pointed to a sentence which he had underlined.

    He had found it for himself!

    "The character who said that has been dropped out," he remarked. "Bring him back, and have Paul Harley tax him on that statement. Think of a reason why he lied -- make him change the words...and you're saved!"

    It was true! By means of this simple device -- or it seemed simple when Houdini pointed it out -- of forcing one character to admit that he had lied, my difficulties vanished like smoke!

The entire story, with Houdini's plot twist, was published in book form under the title Fire Tongue.

As we noted in a previous post, Rohmer created a character based on Harry, "brilliant and imperturbable," called Bazarada. His book, Salute to Bazarada, is dedicated to his generous friend and savior, Harry Houdini.








Pictures via Sax Rohmer Site at njedge.net, and Google Images