The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer’s Life by Sid Fleischman

I recently chanced upon a copy of a book called Mr. Mysterious & Company by an author I had loved as a child, Sid Fleischman. When I read the book as a kid, around 1972, a teacher told me that the author lived in my town, Santa Monica, and she suggested I write to him, which I did. To my pride and amazement he wrote back and offered to visit my school, so I got to meet him and show him off to my friends. It was a special day, and a special memory, so when I saw Mr. Mysterious & Company in the “collectibles” section at a bookstore in Cedar City, Utah where Jim and I were visiting a few weeks ago for the Shakespeare Festival, I had to buy it.

Reading it, my curiosity was also aroused to find out more about Sid Fleischman. I discovered he wrote an autobiography, this book, in 1996, and the library had a copy. So, after reading Mr. Mysterious & Company again and enjoying it again, I read this.

It turns out that Mr. Mysterious & Company was the first children’s novel that Mr. Fleischman wrote. He was forty-two. He’d already been a published author of short stories, written nine mystery and thriller novels for adults and a half dozen books on magic. One of his thrillers, Blood Alley, had been made into a movie with John Wayne. Fleischman wrote the screenplay. Mr. Mysterious & Company was kind of a lark. He included his actual three children: Jane, Paul, and Anne, as the three children in the novel and dedicated it to them. He set the novel in the old west, he says, because his latest novel called Yellowleg had been a western so he already had a lot of appropriate research available. Yellowleg was also made into a movie, by the way, Sam Peckinpah’s first feature.

His first children’s novel was a hit, so he kept writing them, and found his calling. Mr. Mysterious & Company was written in 1962, the year I was born. By 1972, when I read it, Fleischman had written ten more children’s novels. I recognized having read all of those titles as well, borrowed from the library. Particularly memorable were a series of books about a farmer named McBroom with a magical farm. I stopped reading children’s novels about then but Fleischman kept writing them, thirty-two by 1996, when he wrote this autobiography (there’s a list of his publications at the back). Eventually he wrote forty of them. His children’s novel The Whipping Boy, from 1986, won the Newberry award.

Sid Fleischman was born in Brooklyn, in 1920, to immigrants from Eastern Europe, but his father brought the family to San Diego when Sid, called Sonny Boy, was two years old. His father was trained as a tailor. His shop catered to the clothing required by the sailors in the town, so the family survived the depression relatively well.

Fleischman’s first love was magic. Because he couldn’t afford props, he learned sleight-of-hand. As a teenager he joined a magician’s club. Through the club he met another teenage magician and the two performed together. When the friend, named Buddy Ryan, went to Berkeley for college, Sid and Buddy took a summer traveling around northern California in a broken down car putting on shows, along with Buddy’s older sister Mary who they used as a magician’s assistant.

For a couple of years, Sid performed professionally as a magician. He lived with an uncle and aunt in Alhambra and did shows at the vaudeville theaters in Los Angeles. I liked the coincidence that his first theater gig was at the Hippodrome in downtown LA on Third and Main across the street and up one block from where Jim and I had an apartment until a year ago. Then he got a steady gig doing a floor show at a restaurant at Fourth and Hill, a couple of blocks from us the other direction. Neither the theater nor the restaurant are there any more, though. Sid also toured the western states with a “spook show” meaning a magic and illusion show that played in movie theaters after the evening’s last showing of horror films to keep the scares going for the audience.

But by the end of the 1930s, vaudeville was over and the war was beginning. He went to university (San Diego State) and started getting interested in writing. He took a trip to Mexico City and explored the Aztec pyramids then came back home and met a girl at school who had also been in Mexico City visiting the pyramids but they hadn’t met. They started dating. When Sid was drafted, they quickly married before he shipped out. He served in the Navy on a Destroyer Escort first on the east coast and then repositioned into the south Pacific.

Back in the states, filled with story ideas from his travels, he started writing pulp fiction novels, and started a family with his wife, Betty. Looking for a place to live they settled first in Monterey; then, when the movies got interested in his writing, he moved the family to Santa Monica where he lived the rest of his life.

My family moved to Santa Monica in 1967, when I was five years old. Fleischman says that his house was blocks from the ocean and there’s a picture of it in the book. He doesn’t give the address but I’m guessing it was on the north side of town, meaning the Fleischman kids would not have attended my elementary or junior high school but would have attended my Santa Monica high school, but ten years before me.

Once planted in Santa Monica, Fleischman quickly turned from adult novels and screenplays to children’s novels. He says that he loved the response that he got from kids. I was one of those kids. Here’s what he wrote about us:

“I was astonished. When I wrote for adults, I was lucky to receive one letter a year, and that was generally from some snorting reader who wanted to know why I had used a semicolon instead of a colon on page 147. And no one ever writes to a screenwriter. But these kids were writing to tell me they’d had fun reading the novel. I was like a comedian who for the first time hears laughter from across the footlights. I was thrilled. If a child asked me three questions, I’d type out a three-page reply. Today the volume of mail is so heavy that I can manage only a couple of sentences.

“My writer’s lifestyle was changing. Suddenly I was being asked to fly around the country to speak at schools and libraries and conferences and to sign copies of the novel. Many years later I won the Newberry award, and in my acceptance speech I recalled a sunny moment when I was signing slips of paper for kids in a Santa Monica library. ‘I looked up, and there in line stood my younger daughter, Anne, age seven, with a slip of paper in her hand. She wanted my autograph, too. I knew I had arrived.'” (pp. 153-154).

Because I had borrowed his books from the library I didn’t have a book for him to sign when he came to my school and I never got his autograph.

Fleischman wrote this autobiography in 1996. He was 76. His children are grown. He’s proud of them. His son Paul also became a children’s books author and a Newberry winner. He reports on the whereabouts of many of the folks from earlier in his life. His wife has died, of cancer in 1993. After this autobiography he wrote several more children’s novels as well as biographies of Harry Houdini, Mark Twain, and Charlie Chaplin.

He died on March 17, 2010, one day after his 90th birthday.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.