Last Days2005

Detective:
Then one day he thought the way to make money there are a lot of people who had exotic backgrounds in vaudeville. There was a Chinese magician named Ching Ling Foo who was doing really well. So Billy Robinson sort of disappeared and he resurfaced as a Chinese magician named Chung Ling Soo. He had his hair cut off and made into a queue you know, one of those long queues at the back of his neck. And he had himself made up look like a Celestial. And he became incredibly well-known performing in England. No, he was a magician. He was a stage magician. He did these really wonderful shows. And the real Chinese magician, Ching Ling Foo, got outraged and he tried to have a competition with him. There was headlines in the paper, Soo fools Foo, Foo sues Soo. You know, they had this amazing rivalry. Basically, the guy who wasn't Chinese kind of won the contest, as this great Chinese magician. The other thing he did actually tried to catch a bullet in his teeth on the stage. And marksmen would get up. They'd have a bullet autographed. I mean, you would nick with your nail an initial into the bullet, and a rifleman would fire it at him. And this Billy Robinson dressed up as Chung Ling Soo would stand on the stage with a plate in front of his mouth, and the marksman would fire the bullet. And Chung Ling Soo would catch the bullet in his teeth, and then spit the bullet onto the plate. And they would check it. And it would be the same mark that was made by the guy in the audience It was an amazing effect. It goes back to the 16th century. There was a book about it called The Riddle of Chung Ling Soo by a guy named Will Dexter, but The thing that's amazing is he's performing one day at the Wood Green Empire Theatre, you know, in London in 1918. And he's doing this stunt they shoot him, he drops to the ground and he's dead. He actually dies trying to catch the bullet in his mouth. To this day, there's still all sorts of speculation about what really happened. Was it an attempt to commit suicide? He had some rocky relationship with his wife Dot, who performed with under the name of Suee Seen. But the thing I always remembered about the case you know, being a P.I. I guess is that the Coroner's report called it misadventure. Death by misadventure.