St. Martin's Press

There was barely a relative they didn’t support or help to support, although in Houdini’s case there was also the paradox of a man who would blow $35,000 (around $1.2 million today) to buy a film-processing laboratory in the somewhat whimsical hope that it would help make him a movie mogul, while still fretting over a $1 dry-cleaning bill.

In 1908, Houdini appeared as a character in a German dime novel with the title Auf den spuren Houdinis in which he is rescued by Holmes, “his great admirer,” from a gang of rivals who seek to murder him by pouring sulfuric acid into his escape apparatus.

Conan
Doyle’s father does not make an immediately sympathetic figure. Various accounts have accused him of being a “chronic, violent drunk,” a “bearded madman” who neglected his large family, and who, as his wife noted years later, would steal from both her and the children to buy drink or, failing that, resort to imbibing furniture varnish