by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

This much is known: when Harry Houdini came to perform at the Princess Theatre (now the Parisienne) on October 22, 1926, a McGill student named J. Gordon Whitehead visited him backstage and punched the master of escape in the stomach. Houdini died a few days later from a ruptured appendix.

Some say Houdini had been ailing already and would have died anyhow. Others suggest that Whitehead had a murderous motive and punched the performer for his own religious reasons.

So was it murder or a dumb prank gone wrong?

Don Bell, one of Montreal's great essayists, spent the last two decades of his life trying to tackle the mystery in possibly the longest-ever local marathon of investigative journalism.

"We joked about this ongoing Houdini project because we never saw it happening, but we realized later how thorough he was," says Bell's daughter Valerie. "It was amazing."

While Bell was dying from his old enemy emphysema, his son Daniel, a Beijing-based author and professor, made a deathbed promise to his dad to get the 500-page manuscript edited and published. The result, The Man Who Killed Houdini, showcases Bell tracking down various characters who might've been privy to secrets about Whitehead, who has lain at the Hawthorn-Dale Cemetery since June 1954. Whitehead, a loner, died of malnutrition, according to official papers.

Bell - who initially took to the pen after ditching an offer to take over the family shmata business - was known best for chronicling Montreal's stranger breed. His many profiles of our urban kooks, from the unrelenting layabout Eddie "Do Nothing" Baker to the smooth talking street hawker Jockey Fleming, were compiled in the award-winning Saturday Night at the Bagel Factory.

"My father had a genuine affection for oddballs," says son Daniel Bell in an e-mail interview from Beijing. "He found them more inspiring and less boring than the bourgeois crowd. He also had a sense of humour that veered into the absurd, which explains why he enjoyed interacting with the oddballs."

Don Bell's writings formed a sort of emancipation proclamation for Montrealers to ditch their inhibitions. "Perhaps it gave eccentric characters a bit more confidence to pursue their own way of life, and perhaps non-eccentric Montrealers have a greater appreciation of their contribution to Montreal's character," says Daniel.

Bell also brought attention to some of our previously overlooked ethnicities and our city's unshakeable association with bagels. In later years he moved to Sutton to run Founde Books. "My father would only sell books that he read and personally endorsed: not a sound capitalist principle, but he stayed afloat," says Daniel.

Bell's quest to solve the Houdini mystery is more satisfying for the ride than its final destination - he never does solve the mystery behind Whitehead's fatal punch - but his son thinks he knows what drove his father to pursue the matter in spite of ill health. "Although both the culprit and victim had died, the case still needed to be resolved in some sort of cosmic Book of Justice," he says.

Vehicule Press publisher Simon Dardick has been doggedly trying to reassemble some of the characters profiled by Bell over the years in hopes they'll show up at the McGill Bookstore (3420 McTavish) for the book launch, Saturday, Oct. 30 at 2 p.m. If you're one, or even if you're not, drop on in.