To quote my brother: "If you haven't read this by the time I next see you then you're no brother of mine..."

So, with a recommendation/threat like that, I am reading it.

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Well, I guess I am getting to keep a brother because I LOVED this book. If I am honest I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from it before I started. Looking at it on the shelf when I was younger I always just chalked it up to being one of my brother magic books (he used to be a magician- so wasn't that strange a judgement). But it was definitely so much more, so much BETTER, than that.

Will be adding it to my Recommend To Others shelf

Trust me... it's great!

I was going to give this 5 stars. But the book was too long. There were stories within it that were captivating but it felt like a series of short stories and I lost focus in the threading together. Maybe it needs to be read quickly in one go. By the last 100 pages I really wanted it finished. The twist was a bit lost on me because I’d grown a little bored. But aside from the length I thought it was a good read. Somewhere between 3 and 4 stars.

Vaudeville is back. But don't look to the stage; look to the page. For the second time this month, the curtain is rising on a delightful novel about entertainment before television and movies. First, Elizabeth McCracken played the straight man in "Niagara Falls All Over Again," the story of a Laurel and Hardy comedy team. Now - shazam! - Glen David Gold has revealed "Carter Beats the Devil," an enormous historical novel about an early 20th-century magician.

Although he's since vanished from the cultural memory (poof!), Charles Carter, who billed himself as "Carter the Great," amazed audiences during the same time Harry Houdini was escaping from handcuffs and safes. (The book jacket reproduces a typically garish poster for one of Carter's shows in the 1920s.)

Gold opens his debut novel with the death of President Harding. As the nation mourns, an investigation begins, starting with the magic show he attended the night before his passing. Aides knew their commander in chief was unwell and burdened by a horrible secret, but he had seemed so full of life when he volunteered for one of Carter's grand illusions.

Allowing the president to participate in an act involving fire, guns, knives, cannons, and lions - ending with his dismemberment - seemed like a bad idea to Secret Service agent Jack Griffin. Having accidentally assisted President McKinley's assassin, Griffin is loath to take the rap for another presidential death, but Harding had insisted.

The next day, as the news of his death spreads, Carter disappears, Harding is cremated, and his widow destroys a trove of evidence detailing more scandals than Bill Clinton could deny in eight years. Griffin finds himself battling his own department and a shadowy group of corporate thugs to track down the president's killer and his "horrible secret."

But no sooner do we see these acts of mayhem, magic, and mystery, than Gold whisks us back to Carter's childhood in San Francisco, recreated here in brilliant detail. "From the moment Charles Carter the Fourth first learned it," Gold writes, "magic was not an amusement, but a means of survival." Actually, Carter's struggle was more for identity than survival. His wealthy parents loved him, but had no time for him. Nevertheless, his mother conveyed a smattering of the new Freudian psychology and a large dose of appreciation for melodrama, tools more crucial to the future "Weird Wonderful Wizard" than any wand or rabbit.

Assured that their son will head off to Yale in the fall, his parents send him touring as a Vaudeville magician. While Houdini is making $5,000 a week, Carter is "devoured by fleas, his earnings are regularly stolen, and he returns to California smelling like a smoldering cheroot." Naturally, "he loved every moment of it."

He finally gets a small part in a show led by Colonel Mysterioso, a mustached villain so wonderfully classic that the book seems to shift into jerky black and white whenever he appears. (Keep an eye on his hideous little bald dog, too.) He stares daggers, tortures animals, and treats Carter with utter contempt.

What's worse, he rules over Annabelle, "the most fantastic furious female fighter ever to be tamed." During the show, she takes on a group of angry Indians. "The crowd had never seen a woman who could fight before. They went wild." To Carter, whose "most fragile prop was his heart," she's captivating - but forbidden.

In a gambit to vanquish his foe with a wicked act of humiliation, Carter devises a lavish stage trick called "Blackmail." Naturally, I can't give away the secret (Rule No. 1), but eventually, he beats Mysterioso, weds Annabelle, and enjoys performing with her around the world.

Ah, but keep your eye on Gold's sleight of hand, ladies and gentlemen. When Carter's happiness is cut tragically short by a trick gone awry, he falls into the dark side of his trade, devising morbid, ambiguous illusions that leave audiences more unsettled than amazed.

Nothing can cheer him or save his show until he meets a blind woman named Phoebe, who lives in a home for wayward girls funded by Francis Smith, the Borax millionaire and an early fan of Carter's. This is a sweet romance, drawn with charm and wit. He's distracted by guilt, but a woman who can't see his illusions is the perfect person to perceive the good man he really is.

Too bad their happiness arrives as government and corporate assassins move in to bring the curtain down. Carter finds himself at the center of a scheme to gain control of a magical new technology that will transform the world (and ruin dinnertime). How can he possibly escape from this death-defying ordeal? As a real Carter poster once boasted, stay tuned for "marvels that obfuscate the will, charm the imagination, confound intelligence!"

In the tradition of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," Gold weaves the rich history of this period through his own stagecraft, creating a novel worthy of the hype that announced those great Vaudeville magicians. This was, after all, a time of perpetual gasping at new scientific and consumer miracles. Behold - the X-ray! The vacuum cleaner! Carter and his colleagues levitated along that shifting line between fantasy and reality.

In a book full of conjurers, Gold emerges as the best magician of all, pulling surprises out of his hat throughout this wildly entertaining story, which captures America in a moment of change and wonder. The third and final act alone is worth the price of admission, but I'd rather face the devil himself than reveal any details about that part of the show.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0920/p1...

This is a book that will make me get a lump in my throat every time I think of it it. I think Glen David Gold is as good a writer as Philip Roth and that is really saying something. His work is similar because he writes about history in a way that lets you go back in time and live it. You are so blown away by the research that you are then floored that the could spin it into a story. This is a book about the 20s when vaudeville magicians were the most famous people on the planet (like Oprah or the Beatles). I won't include any comments on the plot here but will say this book was for me as an adult as "magic" as "The Chronicles of Narnia" or "The Wizard of Oz." Or for teen aged kids "Harry Potter." So entertaining. So delish. This really is the American novel at it's finest (think Steinbeck, Fitzgerald). I hope this gets made into a movie because with today's special effects this could be amazing.

I put off reading this book because I sort of grouped it in with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay which didn't really thrill me. Well, wasn't I just cutting off my nose to spite my face?

Super tightly plotted and a lot of fun.

#2015-Reading-Challenge-Group--week 41: a book with magic.

Fascinating historical fiction very loosely based on the life of Charles Carter, aka Carter the Great, and the Golden Age of Magic (1890s-1920s). Lots of exquisite performance detail, misdirection, adventure, romance, with the inclusion of the famous people of the era--Warren G. Harding, Houdini, Philo Farnsworth, Borax Smith (of 20-Mule-Team fame), etc--in head-scratching, inventive ways. My favorite part of the book? Being able to decipher the wine bottle label Carter designed. You'll have to read the book to try it for yourself. Fun read!!

It's so rare to have a book that I just can't wait to get back to reading. I always have a book with me (usually several in my car, as noted by certain friends of mine who can't help but comment on the apartment-like state of my vehicle), but then there's the one that leaps to the fore and all the other 'currently reading' titles are consigned, literally, to the back seat. Carter Beats the Devil is fun from the beginning. Gold has a knack for characters and for dialogue, and even the back story is interesting, rather than just poorly drummed-up filler to explain motivations. His pacing is perfect, like that of the showman he writes about. Some of the highest praise I can give is that it made me want to research characters and events to learn more about his source material. Finally, if that's not reason enough to love this story, it has one of the best lines ever uttered in a disagreement between brothers:

"Oh, dear God, you don't actually have a brain, do you, it's more a filigreed spiderweb, with little chambers in it where trained monkeys play the pipe organ."

Brilliant.

A Conversation I had earlier,

Friend: "So what are you reading."

Me: "Carter Beats The Devil, it's about a master magician battling a shadowy conglomerate of the government, corporations, and secret societies to find the truth about president Harding's death with the help of his pet lion."

Friend: "... There's no part of that sentence that doesn't appeal to me."

There is a word for this book and it is awesome. A big thank you to Natalie for bringing this to my attention.

What a magical book both literally & figuratively. Gold has researched & researched not only an era, but a subculture of vaudeville & the magician's circuit during its golden age that few of us have any memory or knowledge of. He weaves it together with actual events (who knew San Francisco had a major blizzard in 1897?) and1920's historical figures from a president to inventors. Not to mention that there really was a magician named Charles Carter AKA Carter the Great. Oh this definitely has the emphasis on the fiction in Historical Fiction, but, like all good fiction, it illuminates truths of this place in time.

I have to admit that I may have given extra star because of the delight of hearing about my familiar haunts in San Francisco & Oakland area back in the day. Many scenes are by Lake Merritt in Oakland which I lived within a few blocks of for nearly 20 years. When Carter meets a beautiful blind woman & escorts to her home for the blind at 36th & Telegraph I couldn't help but smile since my very first apartment in Oakland was on 36th street a few doors from Telegraph. On second thought, even if it took place in Cleveland, I would have given it 5 stars. Clearly & richly written & constantly inventive entertainment it has the pacing, timing, & misdirection leading to a great surprises just like a good magic show.

The ending of this book might not have been as good as the beginning, but I was so obsessed with finding out what happened that I rushed through the last fifty pages at a frantic pace. So someday I'll read this again and discover if it's really five-star or just felt like it.