PAUL MICHEL
Houdini Pie“Houdini Pie” is a novel based on historical facts, about the efforts of a group of hapless entrepreneurs to mine for the mythical treasure of a tribe of ancient Hopi Indians under the streets of urban Los Angeles during the Great Depression. The city was in such dire straits that the City actually granted permits for the exercise, which was covered in the press—a mine shaft hundreds of feet deep right in the downtown core. The story’s real life ending is incomplete, as the project was abruptly stopped, and its chief architect essentially disappeared without (presumably) finding a lick of treasure. So go the news accounts. The novel picks up where the historical record leaves off. It's a tale of desperation, loyalty and love among a group of mostly fictional figures who populate the more-or-less factual tale. It follows particularly the family of Halley (“Hal”) Gates, a young man named after the comet that filled the sky at the time of his birth in 1910. Hal’s deadbeat father Charlie is a successful bootlegger during the 1920s. He leaves Hal’s home town of Oxnard when Prohibition ends. In Charlie’s absence Hal becomes a reluctant accomplice to the treasure hunt, in fulfillment of a promise to his abandoned and unbalanced mother. He also becomes a successful baseball player on a rag-tag barnstorming team that takes on the more legitimate clubs of the popular Pacific Coast League, and he falls in love with the daughter of a psychic who becomes a focus of the treasure-hunters’ desperation as the plot unfolds. Eventually competing crews are hunting for the gold, and Hal and his family are caught in the middle, along with a host of characters that includes a peripatetic Hopi chief and his mysterious trouble-making daughter, who have their own interest in the myth of the buried treasure. The novel is rife with bootlegging, early 20th century spiritualism and the rough and tumble days of baseball in the 1930s. It is picaresque, funny at times and rich with period detail and atmosphere. It's a bit of a tall tale, of course, though grounded firmly enough in fact to be an utterly plausible telling of a little-known chapter in the history of Los Angeles. |
