Meanwhile Martin Strauss goes into hiding from the law, and the lawless. We follow Houdini around the world, from New York to London to Moscow, in his encounters with real-life people including spymaster William Melville of Scotland Yard, the Russian royal family, fraudulent medium Margery Crandon and menacing spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We discover how this Hungarian-born son of a rabbi, apprenticed to a locksmith, learns to pick locks, then masters the art of escaping from handcuffs, ropes, chains, straitjackets, jail cells and upside-down water chambers.Ī lousy husband and an arrogant performer but a master of deception, Galloway’s Houdini is recruited as a spy. He takes fascinating true-life aspects of Houdini, mixes them with speculation and creates a memorable though not always likeable character. Galloway is clearly a lover of traditional magic shows and other old-time popular entertainments (his earlier novel Ascension concerns high-wire walkers and circus culture). Before it’s too late, the guilt-ridden Strauss resolves to tell everything he remembers, or thinks he remembers, about Houdini’s life and work to Alice, the young woman whom he deprived of a father. A rare degenerative brain disorder will increasingly cause Strauss to lose his memories, replacing them with invented ones. Gordon Whitehead, but here is called Martin Strauss) as an older man who’s just been dealt a traumatic medical diagnosis. In Galloway’s fictionalized account we meet the puncher (whose real name was J.

Ironically, the real-life Houdini, known for his death-defying stunts, died in 1926 at age 52 of a burst appendix following a sucker-punch to the gut from a McGill University student testing Houdini’s much-lauded ab muscles. Or should that be lives and deaths? “I didn’t just kill Harry Houdini,” the man tells us at the beginning. Interwoven is the first-person account of the Montreal man who became intricately connected to the great magician’s life and death. The Confabulist centres on the remarkable life of Harry Houdini, the illusionist and escape artist who was the world’s most famous man at a time when international fame was difficult to achieve. Now in his new novel, The Confabulist, Galloway makes magic again, this time of the literal, stage-show variety.

Vancouver author Steven Galloway created literary magic with The Cellist of Sarajevo, the international bestseller recently chosen for community reads in Toronto and elsewhere.

The Confabulist by Steven Galloway