Houdini, shackled hand and foot, took an audacious manacled dive into the ocean from Atlantic City’s Million Dollar Pier in 1908. One of many amusement piers built on the resort town’s shorefront since the Ocean Pier in 1881, this one was erected in 1902, also by Captain John L Young, who lived there in a fabulous mansion.

The Million Dollar Pier, lined with rides, midway games, an aquarium, ballroom and vaudeville theatre and an electric trolley line, was also where Thomas Edison famously fished, early Miss Americas were crowned and the dance known as the Cakewalk was introduced. In more recent times the pier became the Ocean One Mall, then the Steel Pier, and in 2007 plans were afloat to redevelop it once again, as the 200 Million Dollar Pier, though another source says the wrecker’s ball will transform it into a Trump-owned condo complex.

Just down the boardwalk from the famous fun piers was the Ambassador Hotel, where Harry and Bess Houdini spent a weekend in June 1922 along with Sir Arthur and Lady Jean Conan Doyle. It was a summer holiday for their kids and a break from touring for both dads, so everyone was up for some fun, as is somewhat evident in the family snapshot below, even if Harry looks like a stick in the mud.

The Ambassador site is now occupied by the Tropicana Casino and Resort, which apparently used some of the old walls at least. On June 17, hoping to help Houdini get over his grief at his mother’s death, Jean Doyle entered a trance and, via automatic writing, “contacted” her.

Harry was polite about the session, but fumed later that the message from Mom was all in English and that Mrs Doyle had begin by inscribing at the top of the page a Christian cross — his mother had been a devout Jew and spoke no English at all, and nor did she mention the fact that it happened to be her birthday. His relationship with the Doyles was tarnished forever.

The Ambassador, built in 1919, was the biggest hotel on the Boardwalk in its day, and also welcomed Enrico Caruso, President Warren Harding and, in 1929, gangsters Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Dutch Schultz and Al Capone, who needed to discuss some business, like the St Valentine’s Day Massacre a few months earlier. Capone, accused by his colleagues of giving organised crime a bad name, took the train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia and turned himself in on a minor firearm-possession charge so he’d have some protective walls around him for a while.

In April 1909 Houdini performed his manacled dive into the Seine River from the Paris Morgue, which stood on the Quai de l’Archeveche behind Notre Dame. The morgue, built in 1864, had until just recently been a tourist attraction in its own right, pulling in up to 40,000 people a day, including many Britons on the Thomas Cook tour of the city keen to gawk at the unidentified cadavers displayed in the hope that someone might recognise them. A 1907 civic decree finally put a stop to the morbid spectacle.

While in Paris that year, Houdini was booked at the Olympia Theatre for two and a half months, and lived at 32 rue Bellefond. He also visited the Theatre Robert-Houdin on Boulevard des Italiens, and in Blois placed a wreath on the grave of the famous prestidigitator on who name he’d based his own. Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin (1805-1871) had been an enormous influence on generations of stage magicians. His 200-seat theatre was once run by Georges Melies, remembered for his pioneering science-fiction movies.