Sidney Radner
Sidney Radner, who has died aged 91, was the self-appointed keeper of Harry Houdini's flame, and owned the biggest collection of props and artefacts used by the world's greatest illusionist and escapologist, including straitjackets, manacles and his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell.

Also known as "Rendar the Magician", Radner acquired his collection of Houdiniana when he befriended Houdini's younger brother, Theodore, whom he met at a magic convention in Massachusetts in 1935. Theodore was also an escape artist, known professionally as Hardeen, and considered Radner to be his brother's protégé.

Six years later, at Yale, Radner was earning a reputation for jumping handcuffed from diving boards. But rather than follow his hero into showbusiness, Radner settled for joining the family business and became a rug salesman.

In the early 1940s, however, Theodore sold Radner a large hoard of his brother's professional paraphernalia, describing it in a letter dated 1942 as "the greatest collection of Houdini material of anyone in the world". According to several Houdini biographers, Hardeen needed the money.

Hardeen had stored these props and tools in a warehouse since his brother's death in 1926. Radner paid "a modest amount", and when Hardeen died in 1945 he bequeathed the rest to Radner.

Over the years Radner added to the collection himself, until it amounted to some 1,000 pieces, and in 1989 he leased the bulk of it to the Houdini Historical Centre, part of the Outagamie Museum at Appleton, Wisconsin – the town where Houdini had been brought up – and the rest to another Houdini attraction at Niagara Falls.
In 2004, when Appleton failed to renew the lease on his Houdini relics, Radner reluctantly sold them at auction for close to $1 million. The Chinese Water Torture Cell (a tank of water into which Houdini was lowered, head first, his feet chained), was bought by the illusionist David Copperfield.

Sidney Hollis Radner was born on December 8 1919 at Holyoke, Massachusetts, where his father had a carpet shop. As a boy Sidney became interested in magic and card tricks; he was also fascinated by Houdini, and years after the star's death came to realise that, like his hero, he had grown up Jewish in a community with few Jews. Although he followed his father into the carpet trade, Radner also performed professionally as Rendar the Magician. A self-taught expert on crooked gambling, he helped investigate card sharps operating on troop ships during the Second World War.

But for Radner, much of Houdini's collection of apparatus would have been broken up and lost, especially many smaller items such as lock picks which Houdini surreptitiously swallowed before regurgitating them for escapes, as well as assorted pulleys, wrenches, latches and levers. There were also more than 200 pairs of handcuffs.

In its larger pieces, like the Water Torture tank and the giant Milk Can (from which Houdini also escaped twice nightly), the collection represented the key to one of the most spectacular and mystifying escape acts in the history of showbusiness. "I know secrets about Houdini that nobody knows," Radner said at the age of 84, "and they are going to die with me. I think the mystery is better than the knowing."

Before the war, Radner started organising an annual Houdini Seance, taking on an annual tradition started in 1927 by Houdini's widow, Bess. One year a medium announced that she had "got through" to Houdini, a claim that Radner sought to verify by bidding her ask him what Hardeen's nickname had been. (The answer was Deshi).

The medium hesitated a moment as she conjured Houdini's reply from the Great Beyond. "It was so long ago," she announced on behalf of the spectral Master Mystifier, "I don't remember."

Sidney Radner, who died on June 26, was predeceased in March by his wife of 64 years, Helen Cohen. Their two sons survive him.