Biographical sleight of hand?

So I'm settling in to read this new book about Houdini (The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero, by William Kalush and Larry Sloman) and I run across this note in the introduction:

"To make certain stories come alive for the reader, we've dramatized scenes using composite material, but although we occasionally shift what people said in time, we've always remained faithful to what the players said and thought. When we give you Houdini's thoughts, they are based on interviews or letters in which he's revealed them. We made nothing up; in some cases, we've just turned facts into dialogue."

Hmmmm.... I'm not sure what to think about all that. I do appreciate that the authors have taken the time to explain their approach. I'm just not sure I like it, or that I think it's a good idea.

It's not that I necessarily doubt the authors' ethics. If they say they didn't make anything up and that they stayed true to their subject's character, I'm perfectly willing to believe them, despite the slightly subjective nature of what might constitute "faithful."

That said, when I pick up a biography, I expect to read the story as it actually happened. (Caveat: speculation is ok with me, so long as it's clearly indicated as such.) Does it really matter if a conversation took place in a letter and not face to face? Well...maybe not. But sometimes it does -- ask anyone who's ever been dumped via email -- and I'm not very excited about having to guess which conversations are reported exactly as they happened and which have been, shall we say, enhanced.

This whole make-it-more-exciting thing just wears on me after a while. I mean, we're talking about Houdini here. That's not a name that inspires boredom. Besides, this is non-fiction, after all. I say, tell it like it is. If you want to know the true story, you're going to have to put up with an occasional lack of drama. On the other hand, plenty of things happen in real life that you wouldn't believe for a second if you read them in a novel. Deal with it.

I know I'm persnickety. There's no way around that. I have what you might call 'strong feelings' about how I think books about real people should work, be they biographies or historical novels . Where biographies are concerned, if a person actually said or wrote something, put quotes around it. If they didn't, keep your quotation marks to yourself. It happens all the time in children's biographies, and it makes me crazy.

So here I am in another one of my crochety little binds. I want to know more about Houdini, and this book is supposed to have oodles of new information ferreted from obscure sources. I guess I'm just going to have to suck it up.