The late great escape artist Harry Houdini has been the stuff of legends for decades. Now he’s back in the news briefly over claims that he was murdered. It’s not his family that’s calling for his body to be exhumed over 60 years after his death, it’s the authors of a book that came out last year who want to get some publicity. Houdini’s great nephew, his only known family survivor, has agreed to the exhumation, but that doesn’t mean it was his idea.

The long-standing theory of how Houdini died is that a blow to the stomach ruptured his appendix. He was also given an experimental injection by a quack physician after the incident. The authors of the book, “The Secret Life of Harry Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero,” have a far-out theory that the doctor, who had no known connection to Houdini’s enemies and lived in another city, was secretly in coohoots with the doctor husband of a spiritualist who wanted to do him in. They say Houdini targeted the woman to debunk her profitable spooky claims, and that she cooked up the murder conspiracy to have him poisoned by proxy.

All this is pure conjecture, say journalists, but that didn’t stop the authors and their slick PR team from generating the best buzz possible by calling for Houdini’s exhumation:

But authors Kulash and Sloman maintain that Houdini was the victim of a thuggish cabal of psychics. Houdini spent much of his career unmasking spiritualism as a fraud, and one of his favorite targets was one Mina “Margery” Crandon, a socialite who acquired a certain fame after claiming telekinetic abilities. Her husband, a prominent Boston surgeon named Le Roi Crandon, was supposedly a member of what the authors call “the Psychic mafia” and the man behind Houdini’s poisoning. In the authors’ telling, Crandon had a confederate inject Houdini with that serum in Detroit, and it was meant to kill him, not cure him.

Now, you would think that for this theory to hold water you’d need some link between Crandon and the physician who administered the serum, right? Nuh-uh.

“There is no connection between the two [men],” said Kalush in a chat after the news conference. “There might be a connection. What I’m saying is there is more to investigate there.”

Don’t just focus on the serum, Kalush said. Another revelation in “The Secret Life” is that after the initial punch, Houdini was attacked two more times, both times by men punching him in the stomach. Kind of a strange way to whack a guy — send goons to repeatedly punch him in the stomach. But if that doesn’t fly, Kalush says that Houdini could have been poisoned earlier in his tour.

“We don’t have a day-to-day record of who was with Houdini on tour,” Kalush said. “Crandon had a lot of connections. Do we have a smoking gun that Crandon had a friend in Houdini’s camp who could have put something in his soup? No.”

On Monday A NY judge will hear their request to exhume Houdini, who is buried at the Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. His hair, fingernails and bones will be examined for evidence of poisoning or other foul play.

I watched a few shows about Houdini when I was a teenager, and I was under the impression that he believed in the supernatural, and was into seances. All the programs I saw focused on family’s efforts to contact him after his death. It’s kind of cool to read that he was into exposing spiritualism as a fraud and I have more respect for him.

Even on the off chance that tests find that Houdini was poisoned it doesn’t mean that the spiritualists planned it. It’s possible the strange serum he was given had unknown toxic properties.

Hearing all this about Houdini makes me wonder how David Blaine is going to kick it and if there’s going to be some mysterious scandal surrounding that. He’s a tough character, though, and will probably live to a ripe old age.

Some pictures thanks to Houdini-Lives.com