Historical figures entwined in a fictional plot that builds to a suspenseful conclusion. Stage magic - one of my favorite subjects = plays a big role and there are liberal doses of humor. All in all a good and satisfying read.

Bear with me one this one: a story about a 1920s magician who is suspected of assassinating President Harding after the president attended one of his shows. Much of the book is apparently based on the real-life magician Carter the Great, but the embroidering on character and detail is fascinating. The story is told from the point of view of a few different characters: Carter, the secret service agent tailing him, etc. Somehow the author weaves together the development of television, turn of the century magic tricks and gimmicks, a real-life corrupt president, and a blind girl into a coherent, fascinating story... No big morals or life truths to take out of this one, unless you count the old standby of live every moment like it counts -- eh, I don't. I was just thoroughly entertained from page one til page the last. Totally recommend it.

This year I have read two works of fiction that feature Warren Gamaliel Harding. Entirely unintentional, I assure you. The first was Hollywood by Gore Vidal, and the second Carter Beats the Devil. Loosely based on the life of world class magician Charles Carter, Carter Beats the Devil offers a rich and fully-realized vision of bygone San Francisco. The bulk of the novel (and at 496 pages, it is bulky) takes place in the late teens and early 1920's. There's a murder mystery, corporate espionage, romance, tragedy, and comedy, all revolving around a likable cast of characters. Imaginative and entertaining--one of those books that is radiant with the author's generosity of spirit. A great, cozy winter read.

Read this years ago and still get happy feelings whenever I see it mentioned. Such a fun book!

"я просто хотів показати, що деякі фокуси дуже хитрі. аж занадто хитрі. мені, виконавцеві, прикро, коли я щось роблю, а ніхто цього не помічає".
мабуть, у письменницькій роботі теж таке є. коли ти вибудовуєш текст, створюючи фантастичні фігури, а читач потім відмовляється їх бачити, повторюючи несмішний жарт про сині штори. на щастя, письменники не так часто бачать безпосередні читацькі реакції (або їхню відсутність), як фокусники.
але то так, асоціації. книжка ж – захопливий роман про ілюзіоніста, сам наповнений фокусами й ілюзіями. у цій магічній атмосфері і збіги обставин, і передбачувані сюжетні ходи, і жанрові кліше виглядають природно й правильно: адже нам показують магію, в якій усе може скінчитися несподівано, але неодмінно добре.

Unbelievably tedious 658 page slog. The worst book I've read in YEARS.

I fought this book for years. When it came out I was so excited I could barely contain myself. After reading the first pages I stopped because I was afraid that the promise of those pages could not be sustained. That the sheer excitement of those pages would lead to an ultimate disappointment. But fear not dear readers, I returned to the book at the recommendation of a friend and ran through it to the climax in just a few hours. Such was the intensity of my reading that I couldn't put it down. It was like reading, Harry Potter, for the first time. The pages turned themselves. It was such a wonderful ride I read it again immediately. This time I savored the plotting, the characterization, the mood, the history, and dare I say the magic of this book.
Please read, Carter beats The Devil, you will thank me.

This took a while to finish. There is a lot of setup. Good mini stories to be sue, but not a strong thread which I seem to need more right now. But it all paid off in the end. Glad I stuck with it.

Slowly enticing

I could not get into the book for a long while, I read late at night and the early chapters put me to sleep. The story got more interesting the deeper I got into it. I think the whole art of magic just doesn’t interest me. I am glad I pushed through it as the story became much more engrossing. I liked it. but didn’t love it.

By reading the introduction chapter of Carter Beats the Devil you may think you are before a good, solid mystery novel. It has a remarkable, well-written opening. In an evening of August third, 1923, after having taken part in an impressive stage magic show, US President Warren G. Harding is found dead. The master magician, Charles Carter, finds himself in the center of mysterious scheme as Secret Service agents investigates a “secret” President Harding may have been harboring before his sudden and mysterious death.

The problems with the book begin right after that wonderful opening. The thread of the story is abruptly interrupted in the next chapter to bring the reader back to Mr. Carter childhood and boyhood years. It is not the life story of Mr. Carter told through a series of intersected flash backs. It is solid block of more than 120 pages entirely dedicated to describe Charles Carter´s beginnings as a magician. Since this long chapter seems to have been written only to fulfill the “fictionalized biography” part of the book, you can safely skip it and catch up with the story at the beginning of the next chapter.

The book problems doesn´t end there though. After a promising new beginning, the thread of the story quickly dissolves into a confusing swamp, from which it never emerges. At the center of the book seems to lay a crucial indefinition. The author seems to have never really decided what kind of book he wanted to write. The book then constantly oscillates between a mystery novel and a fictionalized biography of Charles Carter. Amidst that never-solved confusion, the characters never really achieve any resemblance of reality and the plotting dissolves amid a myriad of absurd situations. Most of the dialogues are outright insufferable. As someone has written here, by the middle of the book you couldn´t care less about what really happened to President Harding (or the rest of the characters, for that matter).

This is not a good or even an interesting but flawed book. It is an outright bad book. After reading it (or trying to reading it), you are left wondering not only about the criteria used by publishing houses to select the manuscripts to be printed but also about the criteria used by those apparently respectable book reviewers who tells us in the back cover that this is “one of the most entertaining appearing acts of recent years”.

1) "On Friday, August third, 1923, the morning after President Harding's death, reporters followed the widow, the Vice President, and Charles Carter, the magician. At first, Carter made the pronouncements he thought necessary: 'A fine man, to be sorely missed,' and 'it throws the country into a great crisis from which we shall all pull through together, showing the strong stuff of which we Americans are made.' When pressed, he confirmed some details of his performance the night before, which had been the President's last public appearance, but as per his proviso that details of his third act never be revealed, he made no comment on the show's bizarre finale.
Because the coroner's office could not explain exactly how the President had died, and rumors were already starting, the men from Hearst wanted quite desperately to confirm what happened in the finale, when Carter beat the Devil."

2) "They exchanged a few more social comments after that, Carter mentioning his motorcycle, Borax suggesting he use the vehicle and the fine weather they'd been having to impress a lady or two, and Carter agreed that this was a fine idea.
As Carter left the house, his spirits fell. In twenty years, he'd never rubbed against Borax. He felt like they'd gone into in the forest and lost something on the way.
A hundred yards from the house, he saw a familiar graffito in red paint, lowercase letters across a turned-over wheelbarrow. She never died, it read. Such a phrase, beaten down and yet hopeful.
She never died put Carter, stepping over the fallen trees, finding his BMW, into a contemplative mood. You can't save anyone, Borax had said. He did his good works, but no longer fully believed in the spirit his unfortunate women showed every time they wrote that phrase in paint or ink or with a stick in the dirt. Now, finding his motorcycle, turning it around, ready to return a pair of gloves, Carter knew exactly what made him so sad: when faith is gone, what always takes its place is profit."

3) "Daytime fireworks were peculiar to Oakland. Everyone, hearing of such a thing, wanted to see them, once. But rarely more than that, for they were just crackles and dim sparks that left behind them shredded, burning newsprint and colored smoke.
On the ground, crowds were forming—if 'crowds' were clots of three or four or five pedestrians who had folded their arms and cocked their heads skyward—and the orchestra's brass section stood at the edge of the fruit orchards, playing Handel.
But in spite of all contrary evidence, the park made quite a lovely show of putting on a good time for all.
'You know what the hardest thing is?' Phoebe said, as the first pair of fireworks went up. 'The hardest thing is to know everything you know so far and still have faith.'
A sizzling sound, as a ratty-looking brownish smoke trail ignited, and bits of carbonized paper rained down. And then two purple ones, twisting like a pair of snakes, and a boom as sparks made a brief, flickering halo.
It would be easy to pretend to feel faith this moment, suspended over Oakland, with fireworks bursting. Carter closed his eyes. To hear them was to notice that no matter how bright, they were all launched with dull thumps.
But then the people. The cries from the ground, the exclamations.
He opened his eyes. He saw Phoebe, listening to pops and whizzing above. He wasn't lonely. Faith was a choice. So, it followed, was wonder.
By the finale of the display, a half-dozen rose-colored smoke trails dusted with glitter that caught the sunlight like diamonds, he'd found a voice in himself, calling 'bravo' with the rest of the crowd. It was unbelievable—he was actually disappointed when they ended."

4) "She looked like she was bracing herself for a punch. When he'd traveled to the Far East, he'd heard the Chinese knew the pressure points you could touch to ease pain, and Carter wished he'd paid more attention. He himself felt a lightness. He was looking at Telegraph Hill, directly behind Phoebe, where on an early morning in the spring of 1911, he had fallen in love with Sarah. Here he was less than a mile and over a decade away. What a strange world to live in. He thought of the boys and girls who looked for sweethearts at Mountain View Cemetery, and chorus girls who met their beaux behind scrim, and office romances that flourished in the buildings on Market Street, and he felt like there were little lights in alcoves here and there across the city, in cozy dens, in doorways during rainstorms, or even a chilly balcony on the Ferry building. Everywhere, little pairs of glowing lights. When you walked a city, wherever you looked, someone had probably fallen in love there."

[Spoiler]
5) "Phoebe stood with her body pointing toward the ocean, knees bent, her skirt hiked an inch or so up, her face toward him, listening, and then the surf rushed up over her ankles, which made her cry out. She dropped the end of her dress so that its very edge was buoyed on the water. 'I should just accept it,' she said, returning to walking, carefully, south, water sluicing around her feet. Carter rolled his trousers to his knees.
'You said 'but' a minute ago,' she said.
He couldn't retrieve what he meant. 'You remember how I said I liked how you couldn't see what I did for a living? It's like that.' He'd never seen an X ray of himself before. He'd been surprised to find his inner workings were exactly the same as the next man's. It made him peculiarly optimistic. 'I love magic, it's wonderful, but when it came down to it last night, you were more important.' He was thinking how life was all motion and transformation. From boy to magician and no way to turn back. And from a husband into a widower, and again, there was no turning back. His soul was once choked with grief that had now vanished by a method he hardly understood. He stood with one hand operative, the other ruined. It made him feel like he might be both a magician and a man.
She took his left hand. They walked for a few feet, and then Carter stopped to kiss her."

[Spoiler]
6) "There were never moments in your life when you actually saw something end, for whether you knew it or not something else was always flowering. Never a disappearance, always a transformation.
In his youth, Carter had believed everything was possible. Then in grief, he believed everything was impossible. And now, the very moment he stood, pulling Phoebe up with him, he felt that when you had lived enough of your life, there was no difference between the two."

A disappointing read, Carter Beats the Devil is both overlong and underwritten. The historical detail just about succeeds in evoking the pre-WWI and interwar years in which the majority of book is set, but the characters, especially Carter himself, are strangely one-dimensional, and the plot is ludicrous, and, ironically, boring. You want books like this to be rip-roaring page-turners, but honestly, for all the supposed "magic" in the book it really wasn't very magical or exciting. I feel like Glen David Gold missed an opportunity to tell a good tale, to really evoke the vaudeville era and it's shabby end, to explore the imagination and wonder of stage magic. Instead, the book is a bland, messy and unsatisfying. Not the worst book I've ever read, but really not very good at all.