Paul Quarrington has a knack for finding the material for his fiction in the most unlikely places. There was old-time hockey in King Leary, the drug-addled rock scene in Whale Music, and the freewheeling early days of Hollywood in Civilization. But setting The Spirit Cabinet, his first novel in five years, in the superficial world of Las Vegas glitz – in particular, the world of Las Vegas magic acts – seems, even for the fearless and very funny Quarrington, like pushing it.

But then that’s what Quarrington does best: he pushes real life – or at least stories loosely based on real life – to the edge, to the place where the line between the screwball and the normal is practically invisible. Philip Roth once complained that he could never invent as presumptuously as life. Quarrington might well have said the same.

If the inexplicable success of Jurgen and Rudolpho, the two main characters in The Spirit Cabinet, was not loosely based on the real life and equally inexplicable success of Vegas magicians and pretty boys Siegfrid and Roy, readers would be hard pressed to believe any of it. Which may be Quarrington’s point to begin with. This stuff is just too good to make up.

Of course, when he does make stuff up, Quarrington can be a lot of fun too. His oddball cast of characters have some pretty strange histories and Quarrington chronicles them all in loving detail, persistently finding noble aspirations in the most crass and unseemly behaviour. He even gets inside the confused head of Samson, the aging albino leopard who is the star of Jurgen and Rudolpho’s schlocky, sequinned Vegas act.

Schlock and sequins are good enough for Rudolpho – they’ve made him rich after all – but not for his partner and lover, Jurgen. When the story begins, Jurgen is looking for a way to change the act. He is also spending millions at an auction on a collection of manuscripts that once belonged to the most famous magician who ever lived, Harry Houdini. Like the reputations of many historical figures, Houdini’s has been distorted over the years. Although he was profoundly skeptical about the supernatural world, he has become (for his devotees) the example of the juncture where magic tricks and real magic converge.

It’s real magic that Jurgen is obsessed with – really pulling rabbits out of hats, really disappearing – and that obsession has both comic and tragic consequences in The Spirit Cabinet. Quarrington’s rare comic gift has always been to combine the zany and the melancholy in his fiction and he manages to pull off that daring trick again in his latest novel.