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Masters of Illusions: A Novel of the Connecticut Circus Fire
In an historical novel based on the 1944 Barnum & Bailey's circus tent fire that killed hundreds, two survivors reexamine their lives and marriage while seeking the fire's true cause. By the author of The Port of Missing Men.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
90 people want to read
About the author
Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
19 books30 followersI was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut and have lived in Connecticut all my life except for the two years I served as a Peace Corps volunteer on Mt. Cameroon, an active volcano rising nearly 14,000 feet above the equatorial sea. I have a fun family and a labradoodle named Saltalamacchia, also fun. "Salty," my first dog.
My grandparents on my father's side immigrated from the north of Italy, and on my mother's, Quebec. My fondest childhood memories are of sweltering summers blue-crabbing with my French-speaking grandfather from 5 a.m. until 5 p.m., my grandfather wearing a worn three-piece suit and cap, and me, my underpants. When I told my Italian grandfather that I would be going to Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer he told me there were very good grapes grown in Africa.
My brother was autistic, a savant, who would not allow singing, laughing, sneezing, electronic sound (including television, radio and anything that produced music), and the flushing of the toilet except when he was asleep and he never seemed to be asleep. He had a library of over two thousand books all on WWII. As his adjutant, I attained a vast pool of knowledge on such things as identifying fighter bombers from their silhouettes and why we dropped the atomic bomb. "To win the war," Tyler told me. "But it didn't work so we dropped another one. Victory at last."
The relationship with my brother was one of three influences on my writing; the second, my father's bedtime poetry and prose following the Our Father and Hail Mary. "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!" The third influence was the shelf of classic children's literature my mother kept stocked with such gems as The Swiss Family Robinson, Bambi, Tom the Water-Boy, Silver Pennies, King Arthur and the Round Table, The Child's Odyssey. Somehow, The Bedside Esquire (1936) found its way to the shelf and I read the extraordinary short fiction within, including Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Gallico's Keeping "Cool in Conneaut," Salinger's "For "Esmé with Love and Squalor," Hecht's "Snowfall in Childhood," and my favorite, "Latins Make Lousy Lovers," by Anonymous who turned out to be Helen Lawrenson, the only woman with a piece in the collection. (Sheesh.) Also in the collection was an excerpt from the novel, Christ in Concrete, by Pietro Di Donato, which so bowled me over that I decided then and there that I would be a writer, too, just like all the writers who wrote fiction for Esquire Magazine in 1936.
After Peace Corps service, I taught, worked as a librarian and got my first freelance writing job with Reader's Digest. The Digest editor assigned me sports and games for How to Do Just about Anything, a book which sold 50 million copies world-wide. Reader's Digest made a vast fortune on that book alone, while the writers earned $25 to $75 dollars per article. I learned economy of language writing such pieces as "How to Play Tennis" in fifty words.
In 2010, I was awarded the Diana Bennett Fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, where I wrote my most recent novel, The Honoured Guest: Anne Alger Craven, Witness to Sumter, in Her Words.
My work has been reprinted in several foreign languages. I have taught fiction and memoir writing at many venues including the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT, and on the Aran Islands through the University of Ireland, Galway, and online via this website.
I spend time in Fall River, MA, where I took the tour of the Lizzie Borden house. By the time the tour had ended, I knew who killed Lizzie's parents and it surely wasn't Lizzie. The competition, however, is stiff. Since I started writing this novel, another novel with an entirely different take on the crime was published. And there is a film presently in the works, again, with another take altogether. I'll keep up my work on my own version, and I'm convinced, the real one.
Right now: On Sunday afternoon, April 15, 2018, I will p
My grandparents on my father's side immigrated from the north of Italy, and on my mother's, Quebec. My fondest childhood memories are of sweltering summers blue-crabbing with my French-speaking grandfather from 5 a.m. until 5 p.m., my grandfather wearing a worn three-piece suit and cap, and me, my underpants. When I told my Italian grandfather that I would be going to Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer he told me there were very good grapes grown in Africa.
My brother was autistic, a savant, who would not allow singing, laughing, sneezing, electronic sound (including television, radio and anything that produced music), and the flushing of the toilet except when he was asleep and he never seemed to be asleep. He had a library of over two thousand books all on WWII. As his adjutant, I attained a vast pool of knowledge on such things as identifying fighter bombers from their silhouettes and why we dropped the atomic bomb. "To win the war," Tyler told me. "But it didn't work so we dropped another one. Victory at last."
The relationship with my brother was one of three influences on my writing; the second, my father's bedtime poetry and prose following the Our Father and Hail Mary. "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!" The third influence was the shelf of classic children's literature my mother kept stocked with such gems as The Swiss Family Robinson, Bambi, Tom the Water-Boy, Silver Pennies, King Arthur and the Round Table, The Child's Odyssey. Somehow, The Bedside Esquire (1936) found its way to the shelf and I read the extraordinary short fiction within, including Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Gallico's Keeping "Cool in Conneaut," Salinger's "For "Esmé with Love and Squalor," Hecht's "Snowfall in Childhood," and my favorite, "Latins Make Lousy Lovers," by Anonymous who turned out to be Helen Lawrenson, the only woman with a piece in the collection. (Sheesh.) Also in the collection was an excerpt from the novel, Christ in Concrete, by Pietro Di Donato, which so bowled me over that I decided then and there that I would be a writer, too, just like all the writers who wrote fiction for Esquire Magazine in 1936.
After Peace Corps service, I taught, worked as a librarian and got my first freelance writing job with Reader's Digest. The Digest editor assigned me sports and games for How to Do Just about Anything, a book which sold 50 million copies world-wide. Reader's Digest made a vast fortune on that book alone, while the writers earned $25 to $75 dollars per article. I learned economy of language writing such pieces as "How to Play Tennis" in fifty words.
In 2010, I was awarded the Diana Bennett Fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, where I wrote my most recent novel, The Honoured Guest: Anne Alger Craven, Witness to Sumter, in Her Words.
My work has been reprinted in several foreign languages. I have taught fiction and memoir writing at many venues including the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT, and on the Aran Islands through the University of Ireland, Galway, and online via this website.
I spend time in Fall River, MA, where I took the tour of the Lizzie Borden house. By the time the tour had ended, I knew who killed Lizzie's parents and it surely wasn't Lizzie. The competition, however, is stiff. Since I started writing this novel, another novel with an entirely different take on the crime was published. And there is a film presently in the works, again, with another take altogether. I'll keep up my work on my own version, and I'm convinced, the real one.
Right now: On Sunday afternoon, April 15, 2018, I will p
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
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November 13, 2009Okay, I just finished this book and it pains me to admit that I really didn't like it. I enjoyed reading about places that I knew-but I thought it was fairly juvenile. Not sure if I would recommend this to anyone. Sorry Mary-Ann.
September 23, 2025
Interesting, well-written novel based on the Hartford, Conn. circus fire - "the day the clowns cried". Learned a lot about the circus from this book.
November 13, 2012
I’m not sure why I’ve always been interested in the tragedy of the Hartford Circus Fire—I wasn’t there, obviously, and thankfully, no one in my ancestry was, either. I have no connection to it other than that it happened in my home state, and yet, every time I stumble across a book about the fire, it inevitably finds its way into my hands for a marathon, can’t-put-it-down read.
I’m sad to report I didn’t have that experience with this novel; it took me nearly six weeks to finish and the only thing keeping me going was my interest in the fire. Flat and stereotypical characterization, skimming over depth, depiction of unnecessary action and unbelievable situations kept me from an enjoyable read.
The main character is scarred from the fire, but we never get to know her—she’s really not much more than a name, and we never really see her inner damage or what motivates her. On top of it, she watches her husband, a fireman, obsess over this fire for decades and treat her like she’s nothing more than a housemaid—in fact, I still couldn’t see how there was any love between them at all—but it takes her thirty years to figure out she should leave him, and then when she decides to, there is no epiphany to support the change; she does make a half-hearted threat that he needs to stop investigating the fire, but there isn’t any motive for doing that, either. There is also never any motive given for her husband’s obsession with the fire—except for one toss-away mention that he was supposed to have gone that day but didn’t, we’re left to assume it’s because he’s a fireman. Which leads me to another point: the arson investigator and police characters are so clichéd and stereotypical it’s almost cringe-worthy. I not only didn’t believe in these cardboard people, I was turned off to them.
I hate to bring up the old show-versus-tell argument, but details are “skimmed over”—descriptions of her life, her marriage, having a baby and everything else are covered in one sentence: “He plodded on, year after year, while Margie sequestered herself, read books, and while their daughter Martha came into herself,” p. 45); however, then there are paragraphs full of simple actions that don’t advance the story: “Chick called back a third time. Charlie listened for a moment and then passed the receiver to Margie. Chick dictated a plan, which Margie transcribed into the appropriate folder” (p. 153).
Before I discuss “unbelievable situations,” I’m noting here that I’m good at suspension of disbelief; that is, I know that certain things happen in fiction that wouldn’t happen that way in real life, so I’m pretty lenient when it comes to accepting scenarios. However, I really have trouble “buying” some of the situations in this book. Right out of the gate, Mary, who has never had a boyfriend, meets her to-be husband on the beach, but he’s there because he’s getting married within a few days. In the span of one sentence, the wedding is called off and he proposes to Mary. In another section, they fly up to Canada at a moment’s notice for a specially-arranged interview with a prisoner—how this is done if they aren’t Federal investigators of any importance? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems unlikely that a cop, a fireman and a housewife would be given special clearance to do this. In addition, I simply can’t buy the book’s conclusion. Not only does it fall back on a cliché, I can’t buy that no one had seen the obvious over a forty-year-or-more span. I feel cheated.
On the upside, the story’s taking place over the course of several decades does not lose the reader. The passage of time is conveyed very well, through the use of other major historical tragedies. The only downside to this is that younger readers who don’t remember those tragedies may not be properly grounded enough to understand where they are in the timeline.
There are also phrases of merit: “Margie was thinking that sex was the same as what the doctor in Star Trek did to injured crew members—touched them where it hurt, creating some kind of orgasm where the injured parts knit themselves back together and everything was okay till the next injury came along” (p. 195) and “Yes, she looked like a doll, a delicate bisque doll. Yes, a Botticelli angel, as people would say. But she also looked unmistakably dead” (p. 28) among them, because they invoked an emotion in me or inspired a strong, sad visual. But that’s honestly the best thing I can say about this book.
If you want to read a fine work about the Circus Fire which honors those who were there and died that day, choose instead Stewart O’Nan’s The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy —it’s nonfiction, but reads like the masterfully-written novel I had hoped to find in Masters of Illusion.
I’m sad to report I didn’t have that experience with this novel; it took me nearly six weeks to finish and the only thing keeping me going was my interest in the fire. Flat and stereotypical characterization, skimming over depth, depiction of unnecessary action and unbelievable situations kept me from an enjoyable read.
The main character is scarred from the fire, but we never get to know her—she’s really not much more than a name, and we never really see her inner damage or what motivates her. On top of it, she watches her husband, a fireman, obsess over this fire for decades and treat her like she’s nothing more than a housemaid—in fact, I still couldn’t see how there was any love between them at all—but it takes her thirty years to figure out she should leave him, and then when she decides to, there is no epiphany to support the change; she does make a half-hearted threat that he needs to stop investigating the fire, but there isn’t any motive for doing that, either. There is also never any motive given for her husband’s obsession with the fire—except for one toss-away mention that he was supposed to have gone that day but didn’t, we’re left to assume it’s because he’s a fireman. Which leads me to another point: the arson investigator and police characters are so clichéd and stereotypical it’s almost cringe-worthy. I not only didn’t believe in these cardboard people, I was turned off to them.
I hate to bring up the old show-versus-tell argument, but details are “skimmed over”—descriptions of her life, her marriage, having a baby and everything else are covered in one sentence: “He plodded on, year after year, while Margie sequestered herself, read books, and while their daughter Martha came into herself,” p. 45); however, then there are paragraphs full of simple actions that don’t advance the story: “Chick called back a third time. Charlie listened for a moment and then passed the receiver to Margie. Chick dictated a plan, which Margie transcribed into the appropriate folder” (p. 153).
Before I discuss “unbelievable situations,” I’m noting here that I’m good at suspension of disbelief; that is, I know that certain things happen in fiction that wouldn’t happen that way in real life, so I’m pretty lenient when it comes to accepting scenarios. However, I really have trouble “buying” some of the situations in this book. Right out of the gate, Mary, who has never had a boyfriend, meets her to-be husband on the beach, but he’s there because he’s getting married within a few days. In the span of one sentence, the wedding is called off and he proposes to Mary. In another section, they fly up to Canada at a moment’s notice for a specially-arranged interview with a prisoner—how this is done if they aren’t Federal investigators of any importance? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems unlikely that a cop, a fireman and a housewife would be given special clearance to do this. In addition, I simply can’t buy the book’s conclusion. Not only does it fall back on a cliché, I can’t buy that no one had seen the obvious over a forty-year-or-more span. I feel cheated.
On the upside, the story’s taking place over the course of several decades does not lose the reader. The passage of time is conveyed very well, through the use of other major historical tragedies. The only downside to this is that younger readers who don’t remember those tragedies may not be properly grounded enough to understand where they are in the timeline.
There are also phrases of merit: “Margie was thinking that sex was the same as what the doctor in Star Trek did to injured crew members—touched them where it hurt, creating some kind of orgasm where the injured parts knit themselves back together and everything was okay till the next injury came along” (p. 195) and “Yes, she looked like a doll, a delicate bisque doll. Yes, a Botticelli angel, as people would say. But she also looked unmistakably dead” (p. 28) among them, because they invoked an emotion in me or inspired a strong, sad visual. But that’s honestly the best thing I can say about this book.
If you want to read a fine work about the Circus Fire which honors those who were there and died that day, choose instead Stewart O’Nan’s The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy —it’s nonfiction, but reads like the masterfully-written novel I had hoped to find in Masters of Illusion.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2012
Based on the 1944 circus fire in Hartford, CT. This is the story of Charlie (a firefighter who is obsessed with the fire) and Margie who was just an infant when she went to the fire with her mother (who did not survive). Throughout Margie & Charlie's marriage, he is looking for who set the fire that fated July day. At first Margie is supportive of his quest, but after many years she is tired of his obsessive hobby and wants more from their life than the books she gets lost in and her daughter's friendship. Mid-life changes their priorities and hidden family secrets come out with the new generation that is more feeling and questioning than quiet and reserved with a code of honor.
December 31, 2014
Margie Potter was the youngest child to survive the tragic Hartford circus fire of 1944, which left her motherless and scarred; eighteen years later she met and married Charlie O'Neill, a Hartford fireman who seems obsessed with the disaster. I remember being horrified by the fire when I was a child, so I was eager to read this book. It was well worth reading, but for me it seemed to lose momentum towards the end.
August 26, 2011
The story is based on a true historical circus fire and the mysteries of who or what started it and the unidentified dead. Really liked it. I picked up subtle sarcasm in her writing style ( and I always enjoy that). And of course, I enjoy anything related to carnivals. Stayed up till midnight to finish it. That's saying something from this old gal.
August 17, 2012
I really liked it, interesting twist at the end
July 6, 2014
See Kristi's review--that says it all.
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December 17, 2015I went to the circus in Waterbury, CT two days before the Hartford fire and have always wanted to read everything I could about it. I could not put this book down.
September 24, 2015
The book was ok
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews