Harry Houdini Rising: A Q&A with David Jaher on 'The Witch of Lime Street' and Its Forthcoming Film

David Jaher's The Witch of Lime Street resurrects the strangest culture war of the 1920s: Scientific American's cash prize for a genuine medium, the glamorous Boston socialite 'Margery' who nearly claimed it, and Harry Houdini — the world's most famous performer moonlighting as the world's most relentless debunker. With film rights sold and a screenplay in motion, Jaher talked with us about the séance decade.

The setting, he stresses, was mainstream grief, not fringe eccentricity: after the war and the flu pandemic, millions of bereaved turned to spiritualism, with Arthur Conan Doyle as its global evangelist. 'The creator of Sherlock Holmes believed. The magician didn't. That's the whole tragedy in one sentence.'

Margery — Mina Crandon, a surgeon's wife — ran séances that baffled Harvard scientists; Houdini built a wooden restraint box on the theory that a fraud contained is a fraud revealed. The committee fight got vicious, personal and tabloid-front-page — 'the Scopes trial of the supernatural,' Jaher calls it.

The film adaptation is in development with Jaher himself involved in the script — a former screenwriter, he wrote the book like one, which every producer who bid noticed. The book is cataloged here; séance attendance optional.