knight's hour come at last

Knight's Hour Come at Last

03/23/2005

Harry Houdini has been the subject of several fictional texts released in the last year or so. Thomas Wheeler's The Arcanum (Bantam, 2004) has the magician, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie Laveau, and Alistair Crowley as members of a secret society which uses special powers to investigate a murder in the New York City of 1919, and thereby save H. P. Lovecraft. Steve Savile's novella Houdini's Last Illusion (Telos, 2004) takes place partly in 1926 Detroit, but revolves around Houdini's death-defying dive into the Seine River in Paris, an event where he cheats death through magic; now Death has come to collect its belated prize.

Perhaps the novel that started it all was Harry R. Squires' What Rough Beast, originally published in 2001 but picked up for a new edition in February of 2005 by Leisure Books. Apparently, Squires has been promoted since 2001, as he is now publishing under his real name, H. R. Knight, or perhaps, Leisure has realized that it has a diamond in the rough in this new writer who no longer has to publish under a pseudonym to protect himself from an early failed enterprise.

In What Rough Beast, Houdini asks Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to help him expose a shady spiritualist, a tall, mysterious man named Maximillian Cairo. Cairo, a self-proclaimed true magician of the occult, is also the most degenerate man in London. The two sleuths attend one of Cairo's séances, for the purpose of exposing him and saving a good friend some money, and Houdini, who in real life often sought to expose fraudulent mediums and even published on the subject 1, manages to do just that. When Cairo challenges the men and their party to return the next night to see his real powers, they are more than happy to oblige. But Houdini, in his rush to judgment, accidentally frees a manifestation of the god Dionysus, who acts as a conduit for sexual decadence and heinous violence. When one member of the party is accused of a grisly murder, as he is found in a locked room with the remains of his older brother, who has literally been torn limb from limb, Conan Doyle and Houdini set out to prove him innocent, as they are sure that Cairo is simply working one of his cons yet again.

However, as more clues come to light, the men realize that no human could have the strength to commit such a crime, and they begin to believe the medium's theory, that the force of the god inhabits one of their bodies. Since each of the two men, and everyone else in the party for that matter, has had an instance of pure creativity followed by one of gratuitous depravity or violence, the detectives are never sure whose body has been possessed, nor for how long. But the fun of the novel is watching Houdini and Conan Doyle in action, one showing the tricks behind the magician trade (for example, how to escape a prison cell by regurgitating a pick that was swallowed earlier), and the other leading us step by step through the logic of crime scene deduction.

What the two discover is that something not human has been loosed, and this beast is not simply a physical presence. It has a psychic energy that infects innocent bystanders, causing people to commit acts of domestic violence, to spontaneously join in orgies on the streets of London, and to become hooligans, easily inspired to violence by something as trivial as a sports match. In the meantime, Conan Doyle, whose wife has been dying of consumption, finds himself drawn to Justine Luce, a young suffragette with startlingly progressive ideas, and a fellow member of the group that witnessed Cairo's invocation of the god and was therefore infected.

What Rough Beast promises to appeal to various types of readers, on diverse levels. Throughout the murder investigation, Knight captures the pomposity and sense of indignity that defines turn of the century England, and sets it against a backdrop of sexual experimentation, blood and guts. While Conan Doyle shares his country's sense of propriety and decorum, Houdini borders on being the ugly American, relishing the fact that he is always ready to go toe-to-toe with anyone. Other characters in the novel give voice to concerns such as feminism and the sexual revolution, as well as gay and lesbian issues.

A successful mixture of detection, dark fantasy, alternate history, and horror, peppered with both subtle British Gothicism and graphic, gratuitous violence and sex, What Rough Beast is bound to entertain and fascinate readers. It may offer an overly simplistic theory of modernity, but it will make readers think about society and the human condition, something which most genre fiction fails to do.

1 For example, see A Magician Among the Spirits. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924. 294 p.