HALLOWEEN NIGHT, 1983: 19-year-old Dean Gunnarson lies shackled in a wooden coffin that is lowered by crane into Winnipeg's Red River. His plan is to free himself and rise triumphantly, baptismally, from the dark water. "I'll either end up on the front page or in the obituary column," he has predicted to a newspaper columnist. "Either way, I'll escape." Ten thousand people line the shores to find out which. Inside the box Gunnarson goes to work on the locks and chains. The casket does not immediately sink. Gunnarson figures there is time for another breath and exhales fully just as the box suddenly fills with water. The casket, built by his father, has a false bottom, but he cannot get to it. He has no breath left. The water is colder and blacker than he anticipated. He closes his eyes and tries to stay calm. He prays to God. * Three minutes and 37 seconds later the casket is pulled from the water, and Gunnarson, blue and unconscious, is pried out and hustled into an ambulance. On the way to hospital, he stirs. There is some question whether he was clinically dead.

HALLOWEEN NIGHT, 1987: 23-year-old Dean Gunnarson sits in makeup backstage at the Orpheum theatre in Los Angeles, where the live TV special The Search for Houdini is about to air. It is his first international TVspot: The Big Break. All the players are here: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Harry Blackstone Jr. and the Amazing Randi, who will attempt Houdini's famous milk can escape. Gunnarson is a minor part of the bill -his act is a handcuff escape until a sudden turn of events thrusts him front and centre. * An hour before showtime, Todd Gunnarson, Dean's brother and safety coordinator, darts backstage, breathless. "Randi's been hurt!" Randi is lying groaning in a puddle of water onstage with, it will turn out, four compression fractures in his back. He is sped away to hospital. * At the theatre, Gunnarson takes a phone call from the hospital. It's the show's producer. * "Ever been in the milk can?" the producer asks. * Gunnarson says no. * "Well, Randi thinks you can do it." * Gunnarson thinks about that. "Well, if Randi thinks I can do it, I'll try." * An aide is sent out to buy Gunnarson some swim trunks. Gunnarson waits backstage. His face is paper coloured. William Shatner, the show's emcee, drifts over and clamps a hand on his shoulder. "You'll do the job," he says,

The Amazing Randi calls from the hospital and talks Gunnarson through the escape in advance. This could not have been scripted better, except it was not scripted.

Fifty minutes later, before an audience of several million on syndicated television, Gunnarson climbs into the galvanized steel can, which is filled to the rim with water, its lid secured by six locks. One minute, 15 seconds later, he emerges from behind the curtain, looking like he has been pulled through a keyhole backwards, which in a way he has.

The following night, Johnny Carson tells his Tonight Show audience how the Canadian kid Dean Gunnarson saved the day.

MAY 17, 1991: Inside a gutted DC3, 12,000 feet over the sun-reddened cliffs near Gardiner, N.Y., 27-year-old Gunnarson, a name now, is fitted into a straitjacket and handcuffed twice. Under the straitjacket is a parachute, which he will have exactly 46 seconds to deploy.

It is a stunt he agreed to perform before he knew he could do it. He still does not know: how can you rehearse? The Japanese TV crew accompanying him leans in, klieg light filling the cabin. Gunnarson stares at nothing in particular. People are talking, but he doesn't hear. On cue, two jump masters grab him by a handle on the jacket, like an urn, and the three of them, plus a cameraman, tumble out the door. Gunnarson drops into the void. The wind welds the jacket to his body. After 30 seconds, the jump masters shove their altimeters in front of his eyes, but he doesn't see. After 40 seconds the jacket is over his head - a shucked chrysalis - and he pulls his chute, snapping up out of the camera frame with six seconds to spare.

He has been called the Houdini of our era, an epithet that may not be accurate (could there ever be another Houdini?) but serves as a socko marketing hook.

"Houdini was without question the greatest promoter who ever lived," says 91-year-old Winnipegger Len Vintus, the founder of the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM). "But Dean's catching up pretty fast," Vintus is one of the few to have met both men. When Harry Houdini came through Winnipeg in 1923 to play the Orpheum, Vintus pumped the little man's hand and asked him to join his fledgling organization-now the world's largest magician's fraternity. (He declined.) [The picture to the right shows Len Vintus (left) & Dean Gunnarson (right) in front of the First Headquarters of the IBM.]

Houdini died three years later, in 1926, before Dean Gunnarson's grandmother was even born. But biographers and filmmakers kept Harry Houdini alive, and the literature, and the legend, found their way into the blood of the guy who sits today sipping juice in the kitchen of his Winnipeg house.

Gunnarson is watching his cat, Vanna, who is trying to let herself in from the backyard. She plants a paw on the screen door and, foreleg rotated oddly in its socket, slides the door across. When the gap is just wide enough, she squirts through into the room.

He has come home again, though he was never really here long to begin with. He was still in diapers when his father moved the family to San Antonio, Texas, where his sister Loree and brother Todd would be born, and where Dean would absorb a little of that I-can-be-president optimism peculiar to the American South. They returned 11 years later to Winnipeg, to the cradle of North American magic birthplace of the IBM and Doug Henning, who brought magic to the masses via TV. It amounted to a rite of passage, and as if to mark the occasion his mother gave Dean a book about the man who would become his lodestar. Now Dean Gunnarson is 30. He is about the same height (5 feet 5 inches) as Harry Houdini, but slighter. Blond maned and brown eyed, he's handsome in an Andre Agassi kind of way, like some minor TV personality you can't quite place.

On this, one of his rare weekends at home, Gunnarson is thinking about his next big escape, which he will perform on a CBC special called The Magic of Canada, set to air this month. He will dangle upside down from a crane over English Bay, strait jacketed and chained. The rope suspending him will be set on fire, and the flame will creep toward the fuse on a pack of explosives strapped to his legs. Gunnarson seems pleased with this twist on the old routine invented by Houdini. In fact, he is generally happiest when he's doing the spadework for some new escape.

It is an odd line of work. One that requires fierce intelligence. Or perhaps none at all. Asked whether Gunnarson was brain-damaged after the near-drowning in the Red River, a Winnipeg cop famously replied, "No more than when be went into the box."

A flair for the dramatic helps, for escapes are, after all, classic theatre, propelled by an obvious pressure of events and ringing with mythic overtones (the infant Moses, set afloat in an ark; the young Perseus, cast out to sea in a locked box). Gunnarson clearly has an instinct for the theatrical gesture. He once had an artist paint his portrait in a tincture containing his own blood-prompting a local paper to run the story with the headline You're So Vein. After he was caught speeding near Winnipeg, he tried to make a double-or-nothing deal with the cop: if he gets out of his handcuffs, the ticket gets torn up.

There are, of course, some job hazards. Gunnarson's wrists and forearms are crosshatched with rope bums. Getting out of straitjackets, he has torn the ligaments in both knees, stretched hamstrings and strained muscles in his shoulders. ("People think I'm double-jointed, but I'm not," he says, "and I don't think Houdini was, either.") He cannot get life insurance. "I did find one company who would insure me, but it was so expensive it wasn't worth it."

An escape artist can only have a single passion, and a tour through Gunnarson's basement leaves no doubt what that passion is.

Hanging on the walls are some of the 500 plus pairs of handcuffs and manacles he owns. Sometimes he takes one apart to study in detail, in case he is ever presented with the challenge of getting out of it. "Dean's got a much bigger row to hoe than Houdini did," says James Randi. "The locks of Houdini's day were nothing compared to the locks of today."

Randi, probably the second-most famous escape artist of all time, is now a writer and professional skeptic (he debunked psychic spoon-bender Uri Geller) living near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. When he retired from escapes seven years ago, he named Gunnarson his successor and bequeathed to him virtually all his equipment, from lockpicking tools the size of a thumbnail to the famous milk can, which sits in Gunnarson's basement, open to scrutiny by curious guests. (It is a riveted steel can: no false bottom, no sliding panels.)

Elsewhere in the room are other pieces in the swelling Gunnarson archive: a faux Egyptian sarcophagus, a replica 16th century steel "torture crib"-- each of which Gunnarson has popped out of in his acts. Around the corner, in his makeshift business office, there are toothy photos of Dean with Doug Henning, with Monty Hall, with Ron and Nancy Reagan. There are many, many books about Harry Houdini. [The picture to the right shows Dean Gunnarson, Doug Henning & Philip Hornan.]

This has been his obsession: not to be Harry Houdini, exactly, but to build on him. To revive the legend and surpass it. Gunnarson once vowed to accomplish twice what Houdini did in half the time, and set himself to knocking off Houdini's feats in succession: the notoriously tricky "Darby" handcuffs, the milk can, the water torture cell. Houdini hung from the Winnipeg Free Press building in a straitjacket and escaped in one minute 54 seconds. Sixty years later, Gunnarson did it in one minute 37 seconds. Even Gunnarson's Red River stunt was a homage of sorts to Houdini's escape from a box dropped into the Detroit River on November 27, 1906. In each case time has embroidered the details. Houdini is remembered as nearly perishing under the ice, but newspaper accounts prove the river was not frozen at the time. Similarly, legend around Winnipeg is that Gunnarson was under the water for much longer than he actually was. Such, perhaps, is human nature: to look for heroes and then make them immortal.

One Saturday three summers ago, after shooting the free-fall in New York state, Gunnarson made a pilgrimage to Machpelaeh Cemetery in Cypress Hills, New York. There Houdini lies buried in the same coffin he was once buried alive in and escaped. In a rented car, Gunnarson pulled up to the big iron gate. It was Saturday. Machpelaeh, being a Jewish cemetery, was closed. Gunnarson rang the bell. The cemetery caretaker appeared in a window overhead, and Gunnarson asked to be let in.

"It's Saturday," the caretaker said. "Come back tomorrow."

"I can't come back," Gunnarson said. "I'm leaving tonight. I've come all the way from Canada."

The caretaker stared down at him.

"You're here to see Houdini, aren't you?"

This was promising. "Yes. Can I come in?"

"No."

"I'll give you 50 bucks."

"Sorry."

"I'll give you 100 bucks."

The caretaker shook his head and disappeared.

Gunnarson stood there for a moment. Then he went to the car and got some tools, came back, picked the lock and went in. At the grave site he held a camera at arm's length and took a picture of himself and, over his shoulder, the granite tombstone. Then he left, locking the gate again behind him.

Trying to out-Houdini Houdini -- whom George Bernard Shaw called one of the three most famous figures, real or imagined, in the history of the world (the others being Jesus Christ and Sherlock Holmes)-has its obvious problems, of course. Any pretender to the throne must overcome what might be called the Steve Fonyo syndrome: Impressive, but, well, it's been done. The trick then becomes to do it better. Or quirkier. And so Gunnarson has arranged to be locked in: a shark cage in the submarine ride at Disneyland; a tank containing a three metre stingray in Hawaii; a crate that a junked car was dropped on in Puerto Rico. In 1990 in Los Angeles, Gunnarson was chained inside a Cadillac that was fed into a crusher, and escaped through the windshield, the metal jaws nipping at his feet. (Later, David Copperfield sent word that he liked the escape, but would have done it differently. After busting out, he said, he'd have vanished into the compactor.) He has gotten out of a keg full of beer (a promotion for a suds company) and the roof rack of a station wagon driven through a car wash: "It was kind of neat except for the hot wax," he says. "That hurt."

In the process he has, um, matured. Like a cheese. He is different now.

The botched Red River escape in 1983 saddled Gunnarson with a huge credibility problem (not to mention hefty ambulance bills). By no one's estimation, including his own, was he ready for something of that scale. Bill Brace, a retired Winnipeg RCMP corporal and former ambassador for the Society of American Magicians, vividly remembers watching the stunt on TV. "I thought, there goes that poor hot dog. He's gone." But over the next decade Brace would come to respect Gunnarson, who, he says, grew from "a reckless kid to a daredevil who plans out his program." The media, burned once, would eventually re-embrace him as the city's own boy.

Now Gunnarson is a celebrity here. Kids who see his charity shows often go home and play Dean Gunnarson, tying each other up much the way the magician himself did as a kid. Occasionally he is recognized on the street and asked to sign an autograph. Last year in Japan, Tony Curtis (who played Houdini in the eponymous 1953 movie) presented Gunnarson with the Houdini award, a statuette recognizing him, unofficially, as the world's best escape artist. [The Picture to the left shows Dean Gunnarson & Tony Curtis just after receiving the award.]

But Dean Gunnarson remains less than a household name -- even in Canada. What's keeping him from becoming a superstar may be the same thing that makes him a decent fellow.

The world of professional stage magic is a time-arrested place where '80s formal wear and pneumatic, bikini-waxed assistants prevail. Its biggest draws tend to be of a type: folks like Siegfried and Roy -- the busiest act in Vegas -- and of course Copperfield, intense and driven and so shiny the rain runs right off him. Gunnarson has a little Vegas in him, too (in performance he sometimes wears black leather pants with white flames), but he is not an operator. Nor is he a sophisticate, like the magician and current off-Broadway sensation Ricky Jay. Dean is just Dean: a down-to-earth man/boy with an outlaw's name, a respectable role model for the kids, Wayne Gretzky in chains. He doesn't seem to have the knots in the grain, the hidden deviances you'd expect from someone who makes his living as an exhibitionist (a vaguely kinky strain of exhibitionist at that). He doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't even drink coffee since the Red River debacle ("too black and watery," he says).

"When you meet Dean Gunnarson and he shakes your hand, that's Dean Gunnarson," says Randi. "It's not a shell. He's a real person. He's very direct and, in some ways, very naive. I've had to caution him about everything from contracts to honouring people at their word. He's smart about that now because he's been bitten a few times."

By contrast to Houdini -- who has been psychoanalyzed round the twist -- Gunnarson seems uncomplicated, a guy just happy to be getting paid for this. When he turned 30 in January, his mother called and asked him where he wanted to go for dinner, and he chose Chuck E. Cheese. They ate pizza there, surrounded by hyperactive kids with uptown haircuts and game tokens. Occasionally he locks his keys in the car and calls the Manitoba Motor League to get them out ("Sometimes," he shrugs, "you go the path of least resistance").

Gunnarson's own explanation of his motives reduces to this:

"People say, Why would someone risk their life, for the money or for the fame? My answer is neither. It's the challenge. To do something that's never been done, that I don't know I can do."

So it's that simple. Or is it?

There's a satisfying sense of closure, a tidy poetic unity, to a straitjacket escape: the entire cycle of life is compressed into a couple of minutes. Boy begins helpless in a shirt he hasn't grown into. Boy then retreats into himself -- first figuring out a game plan (childhood), then working himself into a lather (adolescence), defeating each constraint in sequence (adulthood) and finally emerging from the experience a tad addled, a little closer to God, having earned the respect of the crowd who chip in and reward him with a small sum. Or not so small. Though Gunnarson doesn't like to talk about the money -- "It makes people say, That's what your life is worth" -- friends estimate he has earned enough to live adequately, if not extravagantly, were he to retire tomorrow.

A good therapist would of course probe other avenues. What are you escaping from? A broken childhood? Well, his parents are divorced, but there seems to be a lot of love there still. Do you have a death wish?

To this Gunnarson has a ready answer. "I have a life wish."

Within the Winnipeg magic community the memory of Philip Hornan remains vivid, eight years after the boy, a budding escape artist, died of bone cancer at age 15. For Dean Gunnarson, the memory has become a kind of compass bearing -- no less important to him, really, than the memory of Houdini.

Philip and Dean met at the Winnipeg Children's Hospital in 1982 where Philip, then 11, was a patient and Dean, 18, was doing magic shows on the wards. Philip became Dean's student. Eventually he started learning escapes. The pair became fast friends. When the chemotherapy had worked well enough for Philip to travel, the pair flew to the Houdini museum in Niagara Falls. They got locked up together in the medium security penitentiary at Stony Mountain, north of Winnipeg, and escaped. They traveled from Regina to Winnipeg, visiting every RCMP detachment along the way and asking to be incarcerated-while Hornan's mother sat in the car outside reading, waiting for them to break out.

During the last three months of Philip's life, Dean more or less lived at the Hornan farm in Giroux, Manitoba -- 100 metres up the road from the little magic museum that now bears Philip's name. Dean puttered on the tractor and did some chores as, inside, Philip slowly lost strength.

When the doctors admitted there was nothing more that conventional medicine could offer him, Philip and Dean started searching for alternatives. "We went to psychics looking for cures," Gunnarson says. "We went to faith healers. We went to herbalists." A few days before his death, the pair sat down in Philip's room, in the farmhouse, to do one last thing. Something inspired by Harry Houdini.

In his latter years, sparked by the death of his mother, Houdini became obsessed with what, if anything, lay beyond the grave. When he died, he hoped he could send word back. He and his wife Bess made a pact, and between them they developed a code, known only to themselves. The one who died first would send the code back. The code, we now know, was 10 words, including "Rosabelle," the song Bess sang on the day they met. Harry died first. He never sent back the code - or if he did, no medium was ever able to divine it.

Like Harry and Bess, Dean and Philip came up with a code: an acronym, each letter representing a word significant to both of them. Dean wrote it on a piece of paper. Then he destroyed it. A month after Philip died, Dean went to one of the psychics he and Philip had seen, to see what she could recover.

The psychic went into a trance and seemed to make contact.

She trotted out predictable, reassuring lines: "He's peaceful; he's looking down on us; everything's okay."

Dean asked for the code. She had no idea what he was talking about.