Carter Beats the Devil
by Glen David GoldHyperion, 483 pp., $24.95
Summer is over, and the folks at Hyperion missed their chance to publish what must be one of the best seasonal reads of the past decade. But Glen David Gold’s novel is a walloping, exuberant read at any time, and deserves to pivot its author, a former television and film writer, to some sort of fame, perhaps as “the man who brought back the dime novel, although now it’s $25 and not serialized.” The Carter Gold writes about is turn-of-the-century illusionist Charles Carter, a real-life figure of American myth who at his height was considered the worthy successor to Harry Houdini. Gold takes the 1923 death of President Harding as his jumping-off point and from there moves back and forth filling in both Harding’s and Carter’s biographical details. Gold quickly creates a hybrid novel that’s part historical fiction, part chase story, part love story, and then tosses in a wealth of more history. As written by Gold, Carter was a showboating performer in search of the perfect illusion, fending off scheming competitors, while running from the G-Men who want to ask him about his involvement with Harding. Like Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which mined similar territory, Carter Beats the Devil is a single-read wonder, closer in tone to an intellectualized Indiana Jones adventure, but far more satisfying.
This article appears in September 21 • 2001.