"The Secret Life of Houdini"

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero (William Kalush & Larry Sloman)

There's two issues I have with this book, one small one and one big one. Let's tackle the small one first: The authors put forth the argument that Houdini worked for MI5 and to a much lesser extent the Secret Service; The evidence here is pretty thin - he wrote letters to the heads of both services, but he also seems to have written a ton of letters period as they're quoted at length. The authors waste a little bit of time on this, and unfortunately it's not very interesting stuff.
But that pales to the second issue, which runs through the whole book and eventually becomes quite annoying. The authors seem to be paranoid that the reader may become bored or distracted, and so every two or three pages there is a paragraph break and the action picks up in a different place. Most of these read like the opening of a book where the author is desperately trying to get you to keep reading, so you may flip a page and read something like "The evil naughty gunman guy advanced on the tied-up detective, clutching his evil naughty gun in his big meaty fist that he used to commit acts of evil naughtiness." Read on a few sentences and it turns out the detective is Houdini and he's just filming a silent movie!!!!!!111!!!!!!!1!1
At first this is annoying, then amusing, then annoying again, and as the book goes on - and it's quite long - it eventually makes it hard to figure out what year we're in; events start blurring together and the book's narrative thread becomes difficult to follow. This is not a desirable trait in a 500+ page book. Most of all, it seems pointless; Didn't Houdini, of all people, have an interesting enough life so that we don't need to bother with annoying gimmickry like this? In the end, this is a frustrating book, and one I'll freely admit I didn't finish. It's easy to recommend getting it out of the library, but given the annoying structure and the sheer length it has to work on you, I can't really say it deserves a permanent spot on your shelf.

Grade: C-