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Daniel Stashower
Daniel Stashower is an amateur magician and author of many magic related books.
This Cleveland native is the author of the Edgar Award-winning Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. Stashower is also a recipient of The Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship in Detective and Crime Fiction Writing. A freelance journalist since 1986, Stashower’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Traveller and Connoisseur [1]
In 1971, as a young boy he visited Hamleys department store in London and was smitten with the world of magic when the magic counter demonstrator changed a penny into a dime. Then at the age of 13, after being fascinated by Bill Bixby's TV series The Magician, he set out to find more magician-detective writers and stories and found the works of John Dickson Carr, Clayton Rawson, Walter Gibson, Bill Ballinger and Guy Cullingford.
Stashower started doing did magic at restaurants, bars, parties and the occasional club show.
He went to Northwestern University and received his Masters in Creative Writing from Columbia University. During his graduate studies he wrote and published his first novel The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man where Houdini and Sherlock Holmes meet to solve a crime.
During a panel discussion for The Boucheron Mystery Conference in 2001 he was asked to appear as a character from one of his books, so he went as Houdini in a straitjacket. At one MENSA (the high IQ society) meeting, he made a champagne bottle vanish.
He has written articles about the Mike Skinner for Connoisseur and magic collector Ken Klosterman for Smithsonian magazine. For many years he wrote the magic, occult and psychic sections of the famous Time-Life series Mysteries of the Unknown.
He is a supporter of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal but also belongs to the Society for Psychical Research.
Stashower authored a compendium of magical novelties (aided by Dr. Edwin A. Dawes and others) which was published as The Redstone Box of Tricks which was later published by Random House as The Magic Box and in its third incarnation as The Hocus Pocus Box. [2]
He lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, D.C.
Books
- The Boy Genius and the Mogul
- The Dime Museum Murders
- The Floating Lady Murder
- The Houdini Specter
- The Magic Box
- The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man
- Teller of Tales--The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle
- Elephants in the Distance
