In this tale, the magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life.

Maugham wrote The Magician in London, after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he met Aleister Crowley.

To their horror, the Haddos are at this dinner party, and Oliver takes great delight in gloating at Arthur's distress.

Several weeks later, Arthur joins them in Paris and reveals that he visited Margaret at Haddo's home and that she suggested her life was threatened by her new husband.

When they arrive at Skene, Haddo's ancestral home in the village of Venning, they are told by the local innkeeper that Margaret has died of a heart attack.

Searching for proof of foul play, Arthur persuades Porhoët to raise Margaret's ghost from the dead, which proves to them that she was murdered.

After finding the magician's dead body in his attic, Arthur sets fire to the manor to destroy all evidence of Haddo's occult experiments.

In A Fragment of Autobiography Maugham writes he had not read Crowley's review, adding, "I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose.