The Mystery of Harry Hadley, a Magician You Know with a Name You Don't

Who in the world is Harry Hadley?  His card, seen here, states only that he was part of "Harry Hadley & Co.," indicating solely that he was both a "Magiker" and "Buktalare" (Swedish for "Magician" and "Ventriloquist"), and provides no contact information.     The terseness of the text suggests that he was a magician of some note because, as we've observed elsewhere, "the amount of information on a magician's advertising piece is inversely related to the fame of the performer."

And, yet, no one has ever heard of him.  Go ahead, look him up in some magic reference books.  I'll wait. . . .

If you couldn't find anything on Harry Hadley, well, that's because he doesn't exist.  Harry Hadley is  fictitious.  So why would a fictitious magician have a very real throwout card - one that I hold in my collection?  So many questions piqued my interest in this wonderful little piece, which was part of the Swedish Magic Archives.  

The back of the card provided a clue, as adhered to it was a small, neon orange sticker.  That sticker bears the name of illusionist Topper Martyn, the subject of a popular post by Tom Ewing, and mentions Tokyo, New York and a city in his native Sweden.  What's Martyn's involvement in all of this?  

Someone (perhaps Topper) took the time to write by hand "TV-Film" on the label, a clue that proved invaluable.

It turns out that, in 1985, Martyn played a character named Harry Hadley in a popular, if short-lived, Norwegian/Swedish television thriller series entitled "Rød Snø."  

IMDB provides the following descriptions:

November 1942. Young Norwegian Anne Eriksen returns to a small boarding-house in Dalsland, Sweden near the Norwegian border, where she has spent the summers during her childhood. The boarding-house is run by Ruth Lind and her helpful but unfortunate son Evert. It is very close to the German occupied Norway and the surroundings are far from peaceful and quiet. Who should you trust, who should you distrust?

A few episodes are available online.  Research reveals that Martyn appears in episodes 4, 5 and 6.   Notwithstanding my inability to understand Swedish, I was able to scroll through several episodes and find the real-turned-pretend conjurer producing a playing card, as captured in the screen shot below:

Topper Martyn (right) as Harry Hadley, producing a
card during an episode of "Rød Snø."

So the throwing card featured above was presumably produced for the show, perhaps as a screen prop.    Seizing on an opportunity for solid advertising, Martyn added an inexpensive sticker to the card to create an interesting way to promote his stage work.

Another mystery solved!

Interestingly, IMDB reports that Martyn appeared in two other Swedish productions in the early 1980s, as well as 1957 BBC sitcom about a stagehand entitled "Call Boy," which also had an episode featuring British magician David Berglas.