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MUCH of it is true: the bridge; the crowd; the jump; the wait; the triumphant reappearance of Houdini with chains and handcuffs hanging from one hand. Newspaper reporters were present. On some things they agree: the date (17 February 1910, a Thursday); the time of the stunt (1.30pm); the weight of the restraints (about twenty-five pounds).

But they do not mention a corpse bobbing up beside him – a startling event that even the dimmest scribe would have included in their account.

Yet before long the body in the river in Melbourne becomes part of the Houdini legend, just like the stories told about a similar jump from the Belle Isle Bridge in Detroit four years earlier.

In Detroit there is no corpse. There is ice. The river is frozen over, leading the local promoter to conclude that Houdini’s advertised leap-in-chains must be cancelled. But the performer insists that a hole be sawed in the ice. In he goes. Three minutes pass. Four. More. Nothing.

In desperation, a rope is lowered through the hole. Reporters dispatch messengers with news of a shocking calamity. Through the open window of her hotel room, where she is confined, an ailing Mrs Houdini hears newsboys calling out that her husband is dead. He isn’t, of course. After eight minutes – eight – he reappears, chilled but unharmed. He says he had become disoriented when surfacing, unable to find the hole in the ice.

Showing remarkable composure, he claims to have breathed in a shallow airpocket he located between water and ice before pulling off his escape when the dangling rope revealed a way out.

Extraordinary.

Does it really matter that on the date of the jump – Tuesday 27 November, 1906 – the Detroit River was not frozen?

Houdini is a master of illusion. Fact and fiction are hopelessly blurred in his own life and work. He does not present himself as a magician or a practitioner of hocus-pocus. His methods are perfectly natural. ‘I do not dematerialise or materialise anything,’ he says. ‘I simply control and manipulate material things.’ Above all else, he is a showman. He is nothing without an audience. So a stunt is advertised well in advance. A crowd gathers. Into the water he goes. Up he comes. And if, in time, there is talk of entombment under ice or of a body bobbing up, well, it only makes the event more memorable for those who were present. It becomes a tale for them to tell. Yes, I was there that day on the bridge, looking down. And you wouldn’t believe what I saw.

It is February 1910. This much is true.

Houdini, making his first trip to Australia, has been leaping into rivers or estuaries in chains since he first tried it in Dresden, Germany, in 1900. It is a trick in need of a twist – and what better than a body? Spectators cannot see everything. All they can do is watch and wait, hoping to be witnesses to something remarkable. Only Harry himself knows what happens when he is out of sight. He is the storyteller. In time, he will also suggest there was a shark in the river in Melbourne. And perhaps even believe this to be a fact.

So, because the planets are aligned appropriately in this year of the comet, he has a submerged corpse in Melbourne.

He also has his wife.

Just as occurred in Detroit, she is not on the bridge for her husband’s jump in chains. She is in a city hotel room once again – not bed-bound with a fever, as in the ice story – but bored, weary of travel and far from home.