Stage magician Maskelyne was a successful stage magician. His 1936 ''Maskelyne's Book of Magic'' describes a range of stage tricks, including sleight of hand, card and rope tricks, and illusions of "mind-reading". In 1937, Maskelyne appeared in a
Pathé film,
The Famous Illusionist, in which he performed his well-known trick of appearing to swallow razor blades.
Wartime service tank, one of many deceptions that Maskelyne claimed to have created , 19 April 1942. When the Second World War broke out, Maskelyne, believing his skills could be used for
camouflage, joined the
Royal Engineers. According to one account, he convinced skeptical officers, including inspector of training
Viscount Gort, of his bona fides by camouflaging a machine gun position in plain sight and creating the illusion of the German warship
Graf Spee on the Thames using mirrors and a model. In 1940, Maskelyne was trained at the Camouflage Development and Training Centre at
Farnham Castle. He found the training boring, asserting in his book that "a lifetime of hiding things on the stage" had taught him more about camouflage "than rabbits and tigers will ever know". The
camoufleur Julian Trevelyan commented that he "entertained us with his tricks in the evenings" at Farnham, but that Maskelyne was "rather unsuccessful" at actually camouflaging "concrete
pill-boxes". Brigadier
Dudley Clarke, the head of the 'A' Force deception department, recruited Maskelyne to work for
MI9 in Cairo. He created small devices intended to assist soldiers to escape if captured and lectured on escape techniques. These included tools hidden in
cricket bats, saw blades inside combs, and small maps on objects such as playing cards. There are several references to Maskelyne supporting the work of British double agent
Eddie Chapman. Maskelyne was involved in making the
de Havilland factory complex appear to have been destroyed when viewed by German
reconnaissance flights to help secure Chapman's trust with the Germans. This included scattering what appeared to be damaged aircraft, damage to main structures and damage to the airstrip. His nature was "to perpetuate the myth of his own inventive genius, and perhaps he even believed it himself".
Doubts raised According to magician Richard Stokes, Maskelyne's role in the war was marginal, much of the information presented in the books
Magic: Top Secret and
War Magician is pure invention, and no unit called the "Magic Gang" ever existed. Stokes contextualised them within contemporary literary and military sources, and the recollections of Jasper Maskelyne’s surviving son, Alistair Maskelyne, in 21 articles from November 1997 to October 2005 for the Sydney-based
Genii Magic Journal. Christian House, reviewing Rick Stroud's book
The Phantom Army of Alamein in
The Independent, describes Maskelyne as "one of the more grandiose members" of the Second World War desert camouflage unit and "a chancer tasked with experimental developments, who fogged his own reputation as much as any desert convoy". David Hambling, writing in
Wired, critiques David Fisher's uncritical acceptance of Maskelyne's stories: "A very colourful account of Maskelyne's role is given in the book
The War Magician—reading it you might think he won the war single-handed". Hambling denies Maskelyne's supposed concealment of the Suez Canal: "[I]n spite of the book's claims, the dazzle light[s] were never actually built (although a prototype was once tested)". ==Later life and death==