I was always an ambitious child. If you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said a spy, or a millionaire. Most of all, though, I wanted to be a magician. One Christmas, I nagged my parents for the ultimate in conjuror’s kit: a Paul Daniels Magic Set.

I have a vague recollection of saving this particular present until after Christmas dinner, when I could open it in the privacy of my bedroom. I didn’t want my family to discover the secrets. By Boxing Day I was a master magician and put on a show that would make even the proudest parent cringe into their sleeve.

When I reached adolescence, I changed: I realised that the most important thing in life wasn’t magic but girls. Magic was moronic, childish. Girls, on the other hand, were exciting — and far more inexplicable. The Paul Daniels Magic Set was a toy. If a girl came to my house and saw that I played with toys, she would laugh and my world would collapse. The magic set went out with the rubbish.

Last year my agent handed me a review copy of Neil Strauss’s book The Game, which describes the author’s descent into the dark and seedy world of the pick-up artist, or PUA. At the start of the book Strauss meets a magician named Mystery, who uses magic to manipulate social situations and impress women. Mystery demonstrates his skills at a bar in Hollywood, where he stops the second-hand on a man’s watch with the wave of his hand before stealing the man’ s girlfriend.

Later, Mystery infiltrates a group of hard-drinking Serbian soldiers, distracts them by levitating a beer bottle, and obtains the telephone number of the only girl in the club.

I realised that I had been wrong to give up magic as a teenager. Magic had become sexy. I was in a relationship at this time and had no intention of signing up for a Mystery Method workshop; however, something told me I had to learn this stuff. A search on Google for magic tuition brought me to p-u-a.com, the website of Real Deal, a street magician- turned-PUA in London.

In the space of half a dozen e-mails, Real Deal and I struck a deal: I would help him write his novel (everyone has an unfinished novel in a bottom drawer) and Real Deal would teach me his routines.

We arranged to meet in a café in Soho. From the café door, I watched a girl remove a ring from her finger and place it on the back of Real Deal’s hand. The magician allowed her to gaze at it for a moment, then took the ring between thumb and forefinger and rubbed. When Real Deal opened his hand, the ring had vanished.

I bought myself a Coke and introduced myself. “Good to meet you,” he said: “Do you have a coin?” I found 5p in my pocket and gave it to him. “And I will need the Coke. Watch this.”

Real Deal placed the coin in the palm of his hand and slammed it into the bottom of the can. I heard a metallic gulp: the can swallowed the coin whole. Real Deal opened the can and poured the contents into a glass. As he shook out the last few drops, the coin dropped out of the can and rolled on to the counter. Real Deal was the real deal.

The first thing that Real Deal told me that afternoon was that magic was not real. I knew this already, of course, but his illusions were so convincing that it still came as a shock. In fact Real Deal’s effects exploited the same psychological principles as the tricks that I had laboured over as a child. The difference was in their design. While the childhood tricks made you cringe, Real Deal’s effects made you gasp. You found yourself checking his hands for trapdoors — ghastly flaps in the skin.

The trick with the woman’s ring showed me that street magic could work as an ice-breaker. In fact, magic was invented to be a social tool. Many early magicians were con artists. The magician would distract the crowd while his accomplices picked their pockets.

Often the trick itself was used to extort money. Consider the classic card game Three Card Monte, also known as Find the Lady. Three cards are placed on a table, one of which is a Queen. The cards are rearranged and the player is instructed to bet on a card. If the chosen card is the Queen, the player wins. However, the dealer uses a variety of sleight-of-hand and misdirection techniques to ensure that the player loses every time.

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