Ideas about digging up a corpse have overshadowed the speculation revived in William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s “The Secret Life of Houdini” — in fact the “secret” — that, starting in the 1890s, Houdini worked covertly as an informant and/or spy for America’s Secret Service and, while he was performing in Europe, for Britain’s MI5 intelligence service.

The authors suggest that Houdini cancelled “profitable contracts” Stateside when he left for Europe in 1900 (and there I’d thought he was struggling to find work), presumably because the spy agencies wanted him to see what he could see in Germany and Russia. The information he gathered, it’s surmised, was handed over to Scotland Yard superintendent William Melville. This is the same cop who (inadvertently, we thought) helped Harry get his first job overseas, when he agreed to chain him up so that Houdini could demonstrate to the manager of London’s Alhambra Theatre that he was the best in the escape business.

Actually, according to a blurb on a website touting “Secret Life”, the book says Houdini was dirt poor when he “walked into a Chicago police station and met a detective who would change his life”. This seems to have been John Wilkie, a former newspaperman and an amateur magician who became the city’s police chief — or was it chief of the US Secret Service? I really must cough up the money for the book.

“Immediately after this fateful encounter, he was catapulted into stardom … In one year he had gone from literally eating rabbits for survival to making the equivalent of $45,000 a week. But then he left it all behind to travel abroad. Why would someone who had finally made it big risk everything and leave behind lucrative contracts to travel to England with no real prospects? Within days of arriving, however, Houdini met with a prominent Scotland Yard Inspector and once again, his career took off. Did Houdini have a secret agenda that would make sense of these seemingly suicidal career moves?”

The New York Sun quoted the director of Washington’s International Spy Museum in pointing out that Britain didn’t really get into the espionage game until 1909, and that Melville was more a counter-espionage man, not an “M”-style spymaster to England’s overseas snoops.

But the authors claim to have had access to Melville’s diaries, which establish that Harry was “doing espionage” abroad for him, and they say that Harry admitted in his own book “The Right Way to Do Wrong” that he’d served as a go-between for German police brass and the American wing of the international police chiefs’ association, whatever that means.

Kalush and Sloman also point out that many of the gadgets Harry invented for his show and in his “hobbyist” investigations wouldn’t have been out of place in a spy’s attache case, from invisible ink to steam-resistant envelopes.

The Sun did acknowledge in this same story that magicians have long assisted the authorities. Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin himself worked as an envoy in Algeria, it reported, “and helped quell an uprising by showing that indigenous Algerian magic could not match French conjuring”. Joe Dunninger gave the US military camouflage tips during World War II, at the same time the GIs were being taught how not to be cheated at craps and cards by sleight-of-hand wizard John Scarne.

In the 1950s the CIA paid John Mulholland to coach agents how to slip drugs into people’s drinks, and cars specially built like magic cabinets were used to smuggle East German defectors. CIA acting director John McLaughlin used to use magic tricks to show his boys how easily people can be fooled.

“Secret Life” also suggests that Houdini gave the German cops the scoop on wanted criminals there, kept an eye on anarchists for the Russians, and helped the US Secret Service track down counterfeiters. One busy guy.

What else? Ah, yes: Harry agreed to teach detectives in Chicago some of his trickery with locks in exchange for their help boosting his career.

This kind of thing strikes the sceptics as a little more plausible than the notion of Houdini being an actual spy. He just reported what he observed, as opposed to taking on specific missions, a la James Bond. Master debunker James Randi scoffs at the whole idea, though, as is his wont. If Houdini had been a spy, his secret wouldn’t have stayed secret for long, he said, just as Jasper Maskelyne’s efforts on behalf of the British in North Africa during World War II quickly became public knowledge.

The claim has been made that Kalush and Sloman were aided in their research on this subject by magicians David Copperfield, Ricky Jay and David Blaine, although why the latter two would know anything about it escapes me (pardon the pun), and as for Copperfield, I’m not sure if he acquired Harry’s diaries along with all his stage apparatus, but of course it’s possible he’s delved deep into his predecessor’s records.