Things That Go Bump in the Night

I like The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher. After all, I have read 220 of its 412 pages. But for now, it's going on the shelf, though I'm sure I'll finish reading it, someday. Let me tell you first about the book, and then about why I'm laying it aside.

The Roaring Twenties were about more than jazz and flappers and bathtub gin. Following the great loss of life in WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, people desperate with grief wanted to believe they could contact their dead loved ones, leading to a boom in spiritualism. Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, made it his mission to unmask and debunk fraudulent mediums. At the same time, Scientific American magazine began a contest offering $5,000 in prizes for mediums who could prove their skills and effects did not depend on trickery. Several were quickly proved to be fakes, but Mina Crandon, better known as "Margery," the pretty wife of a Boston doctor, seemed to be the real thing, and most of the book turns on the ongoing investigation of her alleged powers and the people and personal relationships involved in that investigation.

Some years ago I absolved myself of feeling guilty for not finishing every book I started. There are many reasons for laying a book aside. Maybe, as with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there's an association with something that has nothing to do with the book. A friend brought that book to me at Thanksgiving dinner one year and then behaved very badly, so that whenever I picked it up I thought of him and it poisoned my enjoyment. But after a few months I tried again and loved it. Maybe it's something in the book itself; a scene in Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko horrified me to the point that I couldn't go on, but a year later I picked it up and finished it, though I began reading from a point after that scene. No need to re-traumatize oneself. (Although I generally enjoy and admire Silko's writing, I kind of agree with a friend's assessment that there should be a support group for people who've finished reading Almanac of the Dead.)

I have no such dramatic reasons for bailing on The Witch of Lime Street, which is well written, engaging, and should make a very entertaining movie. Jaher's research is impressive and his prose is smooth, informative without being pedantic, and, as the Wall Street Journal reviewer claims, "[filled with] flamboyant, enigmatic, and complex characters." But it moves slowly, covering the same ground over and over, and while I wanted to know how it ended, I lost count of the number of séances I'd sat through and went to a couple of reference books and Google to find out how the whole thing ended (though I'm not going to tell you).

Pacing isn't the only problem; the title is misleading, at least as far as I've gotten. Houdini appears early in the book, and he's quite interesting, but then he disappears though I'm sure he'll show up for the climax. And while there are lots and lots of séances, there's no seduction, unless you count the intellectual and emotional seduction practiced by fraudulent mediums. But that too may appear later on.

My final verdict? I like it, but not enough to stick with it when there are more appealing things on my TBR pile.