I just purchased a very interesting novel titled "The Magician and the Cardsharp". It is actually the story of Dai Vernon's search for the person who could do the legendary center deal.
Looks very interesting and a couple of nice photos of the Professor.
Rennie

I'm about finished with that book (The magician and the cardsharp). I found a hard cover copy for $7 at Half-Price Books.

Really interesting stuff.

I just posted an excerpt of Jim Gerrish's work in progress entitled "Admit One" on my site. I'm enjoying reading the drafts and proofreading for him, and I've really gotten into the time period of the novel. The advertising blurb reads:

The year is 1925, and Houdini is President of the Society of American Magicians, Lise Meitner is doing her groundbreaking work on nuclear fission in Austria, and Adolph Hitler has just published Mein Kampf. Edmund West, a vaudeville magician known as West the Wizard, finds himself turned into a secret agent for the United States Army to investigate a series of mysterious broad daylight kidnappings of physicists all over Europe. They just disappear without a trace. Who better than a magician to figure out how it is done?

It's a work in progress so you can't get the entire book yet, but you can read the excerpt (FREE) from the first chapter on my site.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke! Great read! Here's a synopsis from wikipedia:

The book is set in an alternate 19th-century Britain, during the Napoleonic Wars. The story is based on the premise of magic returning to England after hundreds of years of desuetude, and the tumultuous relationship between two magicians of the time. It incorporates historical events and people into its fictional alternate reality. Historical figures encountered in the novel include the Duke of Wellington, Lord Byron and King George III. The novel, written in a pastiche of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens' literary styles, uses quasi-archaic spelling for several words (such as shew, chuse, sopha, scissars, headach, and surprize) and gives all street names hyphenated with only one capital letter (e.g. Regent-street, Hanover-square).

I found this book to be boring, quirky and off-putting. The quasi-archaic language was gimmicky, in my opinion.

Just add in a few books that are worth reading. In their own right they are good reads but magic forms a key part of the plot :

The Sacred Art of Stealing (Christopher Brookmyre)- The anti hero is Bank Robber/Magician Zal Innez.

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - (Brookmyre again) - This time its a battle between fake mediums and real mentalists.

A Snowball in Hell - ( Brookmyre likes his magic !!) Zal Innez is back, helping his Police girl friend to catch a deranged but very devious serial killer.

The books are extremely well written. The first two I mention I think are better than the last but its still good. There's an obvious appreciation of magic as an art form in them. Watch out though if you are easily offended. Brookmyre goes for modern society with a viciously sharp scalpel and some of his thoughts on famous folk may make you squirm ever so slightly.

The Somnabulist by Jonathan Barnes - about a crime solving magician in old England. Inventive, witty, dark, and magical.

I read a great one over this weekend: "Mr Sebastian and the Negro Magician" by Daniel Wallace (best known for "Big Fish").

Please excuse if this post repeats anything said before... There was a children's novel from 1934 called _Adventures of a Boy Magician_ by Morrell Massey. It concerned a boy who meets a retired vaudeville magician (actually saves him from stepping into the path of a car), and the magician, who lives in a nursing home, teaches him a different magic routine each time the boy comes to visit. The boy eventually puts on a magic show for his friends. There's a nursing home abuse subplot. In the book, a variety of tricks and magic principles are taught, ranging from the rising cards to making a table with a black art well.

The Library of Congress on-line card catalog lists another magic book:
_New and original magic : comprising a number of novel and entertaining effects : a fund of information for the professional artist and his younger brother, the amateur _
also by Morrell Massey. Does anyone have any other information about Morrell Massey? Is that a pseudonym perhaps for an author whose real name we might be more familiar with?

----- Amado "Sonny" Narvaez

James Swain’s first piece of published fiction, “The Man Who Walked Through Walls.”

Regarding two previous references in this thread to “The Magician and the Cardsharp” – this is not a work of fiction.

Amado,
It's nice to find someone else who knows about "Adventures of a Boy Magician" - it was at my local library when I was a boy and I remember it fondly. I recently re-read a copy I got through interlibrary loan.

Re your question:


Some Net searching seems to show that Morrell Massey is Edward Morrell Massey; there's a page at the Genii website about him:

http://www.geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Edward_Massey

and a net search for "Edward Massey magician" will turn up some other bits of information.

Larry Samuels

The list of effects credited to Edward Massey is impressive--Squeezeaway Block; Silk Cabby; Finger Guillotine; Wrist Chopper. I am surprised that his name isn't more familiar in the magic community. I always enjoyed _Adventures of a Boy Magician_, and the plot is as relevant today--nursing home abuse--as ever, if not more so.

----- Amado "Sonny" Narvaez

"The Stars' Tennis Balls" by Stephen Fry.

Magic plays a small but important role in this very entertaining, witty and clever re-telling of Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo.
This novel actually made me return to magic after an absence of years. Very much recommended!

I have to compile these in a list. So many to choose from I don't know where to begin, and I don't think I've read any of them.

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest (who also wrote the Prestige).

Full disclosure; It's scope goes beyond the sections that deal with the magicians so it's not all about magic/magicians. But the whole book is like a great magic trick in the sense that not everything is as it appears to be and the author does some great misdirection with the readers to tell his story. And when the revelations come, like great magic, you are still left with questions.

In fact, all this guy's books are like the above and worth a read. Hard to get in the US since he hasn't quite broken through here but you can get his books from amazon UK.

Here is a link to the Adjacent which is by far one of my favorite novels of the year:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Adjacent-Chr......75105364

Enjoy!

Is this the full and proper title to Fifth Business? - "Mud and Magic Shows: Robertson Davies's Fifth Business"

I prefer a story where the magician is the central character and magic is the primary story element.
Not detective; general all-around loser; fraudulent con-artist or psycho killer magician which seems to be the prevalent portrayal in movies and books.

Jerry

Allen Tipton mentioned Paul Gallico's _The Man Whp Was Magic_. Paul Gallico also wrote two stories about a parapsychologist named Alexander Hero: _Too Many Ghosts_ and _The Hand of Mary Constable_. Mr. Gallico inserted some magic scenes in both books, like flourishes with a tarot deck in the former book and a wax hand appearing in a séance--with fingerprints--on the _inside_ of the hand--in the second book. I believe Paul Gallico may have been a member of the Magic Circle. It would be nice to see an article in one of the independent magic magazines about his ties to magic if one hasn't already been written. (In both books Mr. Hero exposes the ghostly phenomena as being clever trickery. I think in _Too Many Ghosts_ he makes a reference to one of the Maskelynes.)

I would have liked to have seen more adventures of Alexander Hero. He was an interesting character that might have given James Bond a run for his money. The "Mary Constable" book involved espionage and scenes in a magic shop.

----- Amado "Sonny" Narvaez

I was about to write that it was Edward Massey, but, I was too slow. (Really, I was surfing the Café tonight, and had time to get past the first "page" of this forum.

I had a copy of The Boy Magician but sold it to M. CANICK about ten years ago.

I still have a foot locker full of magic fiction, which I must open up, list and sell!

Dick

I would add

"Now You See It..." by Richard Matheson. (Horror/Mystery)
"The Confabulist" by Steven Galloway (About Houdini and false memories. I haven't read it, but it on my list)

I would second (or third) "Carter Beats the Devil" and "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"

An interesting collection of short stories about magic (as opposed to a full-length novel) is _Whodunit? Houdini?" edited by Otto Penzler. The subtitle is "Thirteen Tales of Magic, Murder and Mystery." This is the list of contents that I posted on the Café back in 2010.
Rawson, C. From another world.
Kipling, R. In the house of Suddhoo.
Collier, J. Rope enough.
Dickson, C. The new invisible man.
Anderson, F. I. Blind man’s bluff.
Sabatini, R. The lord of time.
Irish, W. Papa Benjamin.
Peyrou, M. Juliet and the magician.
Grant, M. The mad magician.
Gibson, W. One night in Paris.
Hecht, B. The shadow.
Ellin, S. The moment of decision.
Gardner, E. S. The hand is quicker than the eye.

Then there was the short story "The Last Magician" that Bruce Elliott wrote about a magician who tried to escape from a Klein Bottle...

----- Sonny