A look at the life of the famous escape artist—and a revisionist account of his death.

“This isn’t just a story about Houdini’s death,” writes surgeon and forensic historical medical researcher Gillespie at the beginning of her book. “It’s a story about how truth disappears—and why, sometimes, it takes science to bring it back.” In these pages, the author provides a brief biography of magician Harry Houdini, from his birth as Ehrich Weiss in 1874 to his transformation into a performer to his world renown as an escape artist to his death in 1926. “By the time Ehrich reinvented himself as Harry Houdini,” Gillespie writes, “the boy who once felt powerless had learned that control could be seized through skill, spectacle, and the mastery of perception.” The ironic circumstances of his death have been chronicled and dramatized dozens of times in the ensuing century: A young McGill student, impressed by the performer’s frequent stage stunt of easily absorbing punches to his midriff, caught Houdini by surprise and punched him in the stomach. The student didn’t know that Houdini was recovering from an operation for a ruptured appendix (some documents hold that the incident occurred before the operation), and the punch killed the magician several days later, on October 31, 1926. By her own admission, Gillespie comes to this seemingly settled story as an outsider. “Houdini wasn’t on my radar,” she confesses. “I wasn’t a magician, or a collector, or even particularly curious about escapes.” Rather, the author is a forensic medical investigator, and the settled story didn’t sit well with her. She examined Houdini’s death certificate and noticed that the doctor’s handwriting didn’t match what was on the document, and just like that, the search for what really happened to Houdini was on.

Gillespie’s enthusiasm is very infectious, and her compelling text includes a wealth of engaging medical speculation. She notes, for instance, that Houdini’s second toes on both feet were longer than the big toes, a rare anatomical quirk called Morton’s toe that may have aided in some of his escapes. Equally fascinating (although considerably more revolting) is the author’s examination of Dr. Max Thorek, whose experiments transplanting monkey testes into humans caught Houdini’s attention and resulted in correspondence, visits, and, possibly (Gillespie posits), an operation in June of 1922. “Thorek worked with scalpels, Houdini with shackles,” she writes, “but both were in the business of defying limits.” Was a clandestine operation involving monkey glands somehow connected with—or even ultimately responsible for—Houdini’s death? “If I wanted to understand what really happened,” Gillespie concludes, “I needed to talk to the best Houdini experts.” These interviews with experts are as lively and colorful as everything else in the book, and the rundown of possible persons of interest regarding Houdini’s death—from his wife, Beatrice, to his corrosively jealous brother, Leopold, to his half brother, Hermann—gives the narrative the tension and momentum of a whodunit. Running through the more strictly biographical portions of the book are the kinds of gritty, detailed assessments only a medical professional could make, detailing the severe pain and damage Houdini incurred in many of his escapes and so skillfully concealed from his adoring audiences. It all adds up to a quirky, irresistible search for hidden medical truth.

An absorbing, argument-starting account of what really happened to Harry Houdini.