Weidenfeld £16.99 pp352

It’s amazing what you can do with smoke and mirrors. Jasper Maskelyne, scion of a long line of alchemists, astronomers and illusionists, was steeped in magic from birth. He made his stage debut aged nine, and, by the 1930s, he was world-famous, a gifted performer, a brilliantly inventive designer of illusions and the star of a series of films featuring a “magical detective”.

At the outbreak of the second world war, Maskelyne turned his attention to ways in which the techniques of magic and illusion might be applied to the battlefield. His greatest initial problem was in persuading the army to take him seriously, but after a demonstration in which he had the German battleship Graf Spee apparently sailing up the Thames, he was sent to aid the war effort in the Western Desert. Maskelyne put together his dream team — a crook, a carpenter, a cartoonist, an artist and one “proper” soldier to deal with army bureaucracy — and together they produced a series of ever more lavish and mind-boggling illusions, often using materials extracted from the sprawling, stinking rubbish dump in Cairo. The uses that scrap metal and wood, cement, spoilt flour, camel droppings and hundreds of gallons of rancid Worcester sauce could be put to were truly astonishing, though even Maskelyne’s ingenuity couldn’t find a use for “ eight large cartons of military-issue brassieres”.

He and his team produced “sunshields” that turned tanks into 10-ton trucks and vice versa; they built fake submarines, Spitfires, and even a battleship. He made the harbour at Alexandria “disappear” by building a replica up the coast and “hid” the Suez Canal by the use of searchlights and revolving mirrors. Finally came the grandest of grand illusions: on the eve of the battle of El Alamein, he concealed an entire army of 150,000 men, 1,000 tanks and 1,000 guns, on a plain “as hard and flat as a billiard table”, and simultaneously created a false one in a completely different part of the desert.

By way of an encore, he scared off a column of German tanks with four wood-and-canvas replicas and a few plywood mirrors, and staged a mock sea-borne invasion. So successful that he was placed on Hitler’s Black List, he went on to devise an infrared communication system, a means of making aircraft invisible to searchlights at low altitudes and a miniature submarine that may have been used to sink a vital shipment for the Nazi atomic weapons programme.

As if all this were not enough, he also found time to devise ways to hide escape kits in soldiers’ socks and toothbrush handles, and invented a fireproof paste to enable aircrew to escape from burning aircraft. A real-life version of Ian Fleming’s “Q”, he designed spy equipment for MI9 including a cigarette holder that became a telescope and a pen that fired tear-gas cartridges. He also did some spying himself, disappearing from a locked cabinet during a royal command performance in Cairo to search King Farouk’s palace.

You would have to be a pretty incompetent writer to turn such golden raw material into dross and Fisher is far from that. Right from his memorable opening line — “Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began” — he shows a sure touch. Aware of the tedium of an unrelieved string of anecdotes and conjuring tricks, he also explores the darker sides of the story, including the horrific death of Maskelyne’s closest collaborator, and he conjures up a vivid picture of wartime Cairo — a city half at peace and half at war, awash with spies, crooks and human flotsam.

Fisher is also not above pulling off a few illusions of his own. Maskelyne died a decade before the book was written, leaving Fisher with substantial narrative gaps to bridge; much if not all of the dialogue must also be his own invention. Neither are there any acknowledgments, footnotes or a bibliography — no indication at all of the sources used. Maskelyne’s life is simply produced out of thin air.

For some, the inability to decode where reality ends and illusion begins will be a huge irritation, but those content just to sit back and enjoy the show will be rewarded with a richly entertaining read. Perhaps the greatest mystery is why this extraordinary story, first published in 1983, is only now being turned into a “major motion picture”, though the recent deafening silence from Tinseltown on the subject suggests that this, too, may yet prove to be an illusion.

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