For millennia, religion, spiritualists, and ghost hunters have maintained that contact with the dead was possible. Lots of money was easily made by all of these groups by fleecing people into believing there might be something beyond the grave (religious groups are still raking it in.) Magicians, knowing how easy it is to fool people, have none of it. This book details the interaction between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a believer, Houdini, definitely not, and Margery Crandon, a very clever purported spiritualist.
The early 20th century was beset with occult fever. Possibly related to the huge number of dead from the "War to End All Wars," numerous psychics and mediums (mediae?) popped up playing on the need of comfort for the bereaved, some "gauzy borderland" where the dead and living might mingle. In an effort to bring some science to the craze, the Scientific American offered a prize of $2500 (the equivalent of about $37,000 today) to anyone able to show and prove physical manifestations emanating from the dead.
Crandon looked to be the easy winner of the prize until Houdini entered the fray and insisted all her conjuring, voices, and sounds were fake. The group fo scientists the magazine had assembled to test her claims had been bamboozled, some by her (she had a sexual presence that was powerful), others by their failure to understand how they were being manipulated. When she began producing "ectoplasm" from, her "nether" regions, I have to say, it got really goofy.
I listened to this book as an audiobook. It's well-read and quite fascinating as a mirror on the 20's, 30's, with a peak into the lives of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini. Some of the minute detail of the seances got a bit mind-blowing but not so much that I wouldn't recommend the book.
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