Having only recently moved and settled in Winkler, Leon Cygman is quickly establishing himself here as a fiction writer.
Leon Cygman’s first book, Houdini and Doyle, is out now
He has self-published his first book of fiction called Houdini and Doyle: The Return of Jack, and it builds a story with two famous characters at its core: escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini and writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who is most famous for Sherlock Holmes.
The book offers a blend of historical fiction, paranormal mystery, detective suspense, and real-life legends, and it explores the thin line between illusion and truth and how far one must go to stop a nightmare reborn.
“I’ve written a lot academic stuff … I written some academic textbooks on statistics,” Cygman said in a phone interview. “I always enjoyed the writing process, but this is my first work of fiction.
“I’ve had this idea in my head for a long time. I’ve always had an interest in Houdini and his magic. I’ve been an amateur magician, and I’ve enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes series and Arthur Conan Doyle’s life, and the idea of reuniting them is something I’ve always thought about … to tackle a problem that they can both be a part of in solving.”
Cygman was born in Ukraine but his family moved to Montreal when he was about three years old. He attended university there and worked in construction for a while as an engineer before going into teaching.
He had been living Calgary, where he worked as a university professor, before moving to Winkler in retirement.
The story of Houdini and Doyle is set in London in 1923 when a series of grisly murders shakes Whitechapel—killings horrifyingly similar to those committed by Jack the Ripper 35 years earlier. It all seems to point to one terrifying question: has Jack the Ripper returned?
Conan Doyle and Houdini team up to investigate a terrifying possibility: that Jack the Ripper’s evil perhaps didn’t die—it waited.
Cygman said there is something about the era and the London setting as well as even the characters that has been a real draw for him.
“That time period was quite interesting in the history of London. It was after the world war, and there was a lot of poverty in Whitechapel,” he noted. “And the Jack the Ripper murders caught the imagination of a lot of people, and being unsolved still to this day creates a lot of local lore around it.”
An interesting fact is that Houdini and Conan Doyle did know each other in real life, Cygman noted.
“Houdini discovered there were a lot of people trying to fake spiritualism to contact the dead … and Conan Doyle was very interested in spiritualism. His wife was a medium, and he kind of challenged Houdini that his wife could contact Houdini’s mother.
“It turned out to be a fraud, and Houdini got quite insulted by that and broke off their relationship … but my book reunites them.
“All of the characters in the book except for the detectives are real-life people,” Cygman added. “And the events that I describe in the book are real-life events, and I just weave the story into their lives.”
He sees two key themes at the heart of the story.
“On the surface, it’s the resurgence of the hunt for Jack the Ripper, but on a bigger picture, it’s about teamwork and how people from different means could attack this problem and work together.”
Cygman now has his sights set on a second book which he hopes will be out by the end of the year, and there is also a third one in the works involving the same characters.
“I’ve certainly enjoyed the writing process a lot more than I had thought,” he shared. “I’m a researcher at heart, so researching the book, making sure that everything was period correct was something important to me.
“I really love the characters and especially the Houdini and Conan Doyle partnership, so those two characters will be back again.”
You can learn more online at houdinianddoyle.com.
