Ragtime Houdini vs IRL Houdini

In class, we went over why the title of the book was called Ragtime and I had an interesting thought. Each of the characters, especially the famous ones, are crafted by Doctorrow with elements of history and fiction that weave together. I like to view this "weaving together" of history and fiction similarly to a ragtime piano song with one hand playing history and the other playing fiction. There might be more aspects of history or fiction present in one character but without either you can't play a full Ragtime song. 

I did some research and I first looked into Houdini since I really liked his character. Based on what I read, Houdini really did become very interested in mediums and trying to talk to the dead after his mother's death. Originally while reading this part of the book it kinda reminded me of a horror movie and how a bunch of them have a common thread of some type of communication with the dead. With this in mind, I thought the whole part was fictitious and something made up to help further develop Houdini's character when in reality it actually happened. I couldn't dig up any information as to whether his magic and escaping stunts became more dangerous which means Doctorrow might've put this in to show Houdini's mental state after his mother's death. However, I did find something else interesting about IRL Houdini. When he went to meet up with mediums, he would also expose them due to his knowledge of magician tricks and got into a pretty notable beef with a famous medium (Mina Crandon). 

Maybe he was driven to find a true medium in order to talk to his mother similar to his motives in the book. We'll never know. But Doctorrow does a good job of morphing a character and choosing which hands to play with and what to incorporate when writing a character.