Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 February 06 • Wednesday

Melville House Publishing has, sort of, reprinted Harry Houdini's The Right Way To Do Wrong, a book about criminals and their methods first published in 1906.

I say sort of because this slim book (150 pages) contains selections from The Right Way To Do Wrong as well as selections from two other books, Magical Rope Ties and Escapes and Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (both 1920), and from Conjurers' Monthly Magazine (1906–1907).

An anecdote about female criminals could serve as the story idea for I Was an Adventuress (1940) or The Lady Eve (1941—I suspect it of being inspired by I Was an Adventuress).

The best pieces are Houdini's stories of his own life and career. These are probably from Conjurers'. It's easy to make an intelligent guess about where the contents originate, but it would have been nice if this volume simply told the reader where the selections were first published.

Some footnotes would have been helpful as well. Houdini makes a passing reference to "the Thaw trial", which I then read about on Wikipedia and found fascinating. Topical references such as these could be helpfully identified in the printed volume, though.

Melville House should be congratulated for bringing these writings to the public's attention once again. They make interesting reading and left me wanting more. A quick look at Google Books turned up scanned versions of some of the original books. The Right Way To Do Wrong is there, copied from the Harvard University library, and has really nice illustrations to accompany the text.

Only the edition pictured above, however, has an introduction by Teller, and that's worth reading too.