Halfway through our conversation, Andy Nyman is offering me details of his special recipe for Pesach eingemacht, or beetroot jam.

Strictly speaking it’s not his recipe, but his twist on a classic Evelyn Rose number; his is lovingly prepared in “a 120-year-old pan, my great-grandma used it, my grandma, my mum, and now me. The secret is to cook it until everything is golden.”
His partner in crime, Jeremy Dyson, meanwhile, is smiling benevolently from his side of the Zoom screen. We did not convene to discuss eingemacht, but nevertheless it seems appropriate to a conversation with two of the nicest men in the arts world, each of whom has Jewishness running through him like a stick of rock.

We are, in fact, here to discuss Nyman and Dyson’s first novel together, the rather wonderful The Warlock Effect.

It’s a rollicking Boys’ Own-style adventure set in 1950s Soho and beyond, in which a Jewish refugee from the Nazis becomes one of the best practitioners of stage magic in Britain. As if that’s not enough, Louis Warlock, our hero, gets recruited by the British secret service.

If Nyman and Dyson are familiar names, they should be. Each has carved a singular path through the creative arts, as writers, actors, directors, and, indeed, working with magic.

Nyman, an accomplished magician and mentalist, has collaborated with Derren Brown on many of his shows, and wowed audiences as Tevye in Trevor Nunn’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. Dyson was one of the writers and creators of the legendary TV show The League of Gentlemen, while the two collaborated on the successful theatre and film enterprise Ghost Stories.

And to cap it all, they are the best of friends, having met at a Chai summer camp when they were 15. Nyman is from Leicester and Dyson from Leeds.

After the success of Ghost Stories on stage, it was turned into a film, and Nyman and Dyson thought up the idea of a second film, focusing on a magician who becomes a spy. “We did quite a lot of work on it,” says Nyman, “but it became obvious it was going to be very expensive as a film.

So we parked the project — until a publisher came to us and asked if we had anything on the stocks to do with magic. We said, funny you should say that…”

Writing Warlock as a novel became “the perfect pandemic project, when the theatres were closed and they weren’t initially making any films”.

For every joint project they do, says Nyman, “we do an enormous amount of plotting. And we adore each other: we are the oldest and best of friends. So we just talk, about our life, our families, our health, what we think is great, what we think is meshugge — and what we’re feeling.

It’s a completely safe space. And within that, it’s remarkable the way you start to mine things that are important to you, but suddenly feel sympatico when you apply them to the characters in the book.”

Then they work out the plot. Each goes away to write an agreed section and they reconvene two weeks later to review the material.
“Usual rules”, they tell each other, which means that they can comment as freely as possible on what the other has written.

The setting of Warlock is very specific: 1953, Coronation year and the year, says Dyson, that the first Bond book, Casino Royale, was published.

It was important, he says, that the adventure should take place close to the end of the war, which means that the former Ludvik Weinschenk is indeed a very young magician — but he is a master of his craft.

The early 1950s, says Dyson, “were a golden era for British magic. A lot of the people and places that we refer to are real: so it felt like a very rich time for that world, in respect of the performers, the magic dealers that were around in the West End, the nightclubs. It was so vibrant then.

"And the other thing is not a small thing: it is the Jewishness of the character.”
Nyman leaps in. “That was very early, that he was Kindertransport or the equivalent, that was how we were going to meet him.”

He adds: “There aren’t many people who write British Jewish stories. If anything, this book is all about identity and how you define yourself. [Being a British Jew] is a unique experience, it’s not like being an American Jew, especially immediately post-war. Our experience is one of shushkying [keeping quiet], not ‘look how big and safe we are, we’re here’. It’s not. Our experience is ‘it’s on our doorstep, don’t make a fuss’.

“That was still prevalent when we were kids at school, and a big part of our parents’ lives, and that of our zeides.

"The ripples of that feed into who we are, irrespective of whether we go to shul or who we married. It doesn’t matter, because it’s in the DNA of who we are, as men with families, as creators and authors. And magic — the history of Jews in magic is disproportionately massive. It’s an extraordinary thing.

"There’s a giant question there that Jeremy and I may well go on to explore.”

Dyson says: “I remember when I first moved to London, going to the International Magic Shop in Clerkenwell. It’s still there, the last and only surviving magic shop in London. There was this big old Jewish guy, sat, not behind the counter but in front of it, showing these kids, teenagers, the most amazing magic tricks. Coin magic.

"He looked like someone you’d see in the back row of shul. And that was Bobby Bernard, one of the great coin magicians of all time. If you knew anything about magic, it was like stepping into a history book. And that’s really an unwritten history, the Jews within the magic world, it’s like a secret within a secret.”

Nyman cackles. “Put together any of those top magicians, you’d have a minyan, any night of the week.”

Dyson concurs. When he first got into magic as a teenager, sending off for books that you couldn’t buy in an ordinary bookshop, his first thought was that he had stumbled into an alternative world “which was Talmudic. There were books, and then there were books of commentary. Not a surprise that half of it was written by Jews.”

There’s a good deal in Warlock about brainwashing and the life of the mind, bringing faint echoes of Natan Sharansky and the way he armed himself against his Soviet prison guards by playing chess games in his head. Dyson agrees: the issue of refuseniks, he says, “was in the air that we breathed when we were growing up.

"My mum was involved in a Jewish theatre group in Leeds called Limelight and they put on two one-act plays.

"She directed one, which was about Sharansky, and I was in the other, which was about Dr Korczak and the children he tried to save from the Nazis. It was just there, we were aware of it.”

Famously, magicians guard their secrets, but Warlock, unusually, features the explanations behind a select few tricks. Nyman says these are tricks in the public domain and some are very old: one, indeed, from the 1700s — “one of the first published tricks ever”.

But his approach is one of wanting to share his expertise. So the explanations could certainly benefit aspiring magicians, and Nyman says that if he were working with a young magician, he would be teaching them in similar fashion to the way Warlock is written.

Most of all, readers are asked to look at a problem sideways and come up with a new solution. “How wonderful, we thought, to inspire people who’d never done magic to think, I’m going to have a go at that. It is the most brilliant hobby in the world.”

Do audiences want to be fooled when they go to see a magic act? “There are two levels,” Nyman says. “When you go to see a woman sawn in half, or [the magician] taking a coin and making it vanish — you, as an audience, are complicit in the theatre of that. That coin has not dematerialised, that woman’s internal organs have not been severed.

"The exception to that is mentalism, magic of the mind. Within that, people are left asking, how have you done that? It’s the only branch [of magic] that has a real question mark against it, and it’s something we explore in the book.”

Perhaps that affinity with mentalism has seeped into Nyman and Dyson’s relationship. Dyson agrees. “It’s not telepathy, but when we are working as directors, we tell the crew that they can tell one of us something and they don’t need to tell the other one, because we tend to think the same thing. A sort of alchemy goes on there.”

With great joy, I learn that the adventures of Louis Warlock do not end with this novel. Not only have the alchemists signed a two-book deal, but there are plans in place to put him on TV.

Meanwhile, the next generation of Nymans and Dysons are considering their approach to magic.

Jeremy Dyson’s elder daughter, has taught herself some card tricks, while Preston Nyman, Andy’s son, is already launched on a career and has become a member of the Magic Circle.“We can’t wait to show each other a trick,” says Nyman. “But the rule is, you’re not allowed to ask how it works.”

‘The Warlock Effect’ by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman is published by Hodder this week