Carter Beats The Devil, by Glen David Gold

Latent Book Club Review #2413

Jul 28, 2024

Heroes emerge triumphant, foes are vanquished, and a surprising undercurrent of pathos can be found in Glen David Gold’s beguiling, but somewhat shallow historical fiction page-turner about American Magician, Charles Carter.

Charles Carter (1874-1936) was a real-life magician. A contemporary of more established household names, Houdini and Thurston, Carter plied his trade during the golden age of Vaudeville. This was a time—post industrialisation, but prior to the widespread availability of movies—that Vaudeville, a variety show of sorts which featured everything from acrobats to magicians and beyond shone. Vaudeville fell into terminal decline in the 1930s, but remains spoken of fondly even today, and in many senses paved a cultural path for later on-screen stars to follow.

Carter Beats the Devil is an historical fiction (with the emphasis firmly on the latter noun) builds on the blueprints of Carter’s life. However, the action centres around a narrative that is purely the product of author Glen David Gold’s imagination.

We should take a moment to reflect how amazing it is that Gold got this novel into print in the first place. It had every ingredient required for it to go wrong. For a start, it’s very long, weighing in at around 500 pages. It was Gold’s first novel. It is a historical fiction. About magicians. Added to this, it features cameos of various real-life figures, building on a conspiracy plot that President Warren Harding did not die of natural causes, but in Gold’s retelling, faked his own death. And it is now old (Published 2001).

We should reflect, for a moment, on the legerdemain author Glen David Gold pulled off to get his novel in to print in the first place. It had every ingredient required for it to go wrong. It is very long. It was a first novel. It is a historical fiction. About magicians. Ordinarily any one of these things would undoubtedly be a publisher’s nightmare.

Despite all these things, which ordinarily would work against any book (and undoubtedly would be a publisher’s nightmare) in large part Carter Beats the Devil seems to work, although its convoluted mini-plots that start and fizzle out throughout, and oddly involved narrative structure detract from it.

So, what is it about? This thick novel opens with Carter at the peak of his powers, performing a dazzling show with President Harding as one of the attendees. For his finale, Carter invites the President on stage to assist him with a trick, in which he ‘Beats the Devil’. Hours later, Harding is dead and Carter is a prime suspect in the President’s death. But what happened - to the trick, and to Harding?

We then go back in time as the novel proper begins as a Bildungsroman, charting Carter the Great’s intrepid journey as a young magician. In perhaps the most compelling part of the narrative, Carter is repeatedly thwarted. Both as a child, and as a young man in his forays into the magic world are met with continual struggle. It is said that an encounter with a cheating sideshow con artist at a carnival gave Carter the urge to enter the magic world — precisely what form that urge took, however, is never quite articulated: is it the desire to be better than this, or a desire for revenge? The reader is left to infer Carter’s motivation from this set-up, and what follows.

In contrast to his brother, James Carter, who follows in his father’s footsteps and goes to university before entering business, Charles Carter decides not to pursue academia, and instead devotes his life to magic. This draws disapprobation from his semi-aristocratic mother and father. Carter fails and fails again, to the point of being destitute, before packing up to go on one final make-or-break US tour with a company of Vaudevillians.

At this point, Carter encounters Mysterioso - an almost comedically Flashman-like nemesis of the decidedly evil bent, that that sets up the finale of the novel. Mysterioso really does have it all - he is cruel to his fellow thespians, greedy, mistreats animals, and of course, he hates and perhaps is jealous of Carter, whom he attempts to sabotage. He is every inch the diabolical villain plucked from a Boy’s Own tale of derring-do. As to whether this works, well, yes—to a degree—he is less subtle than Dr Moriarty, certainly, but not entirely a blunt instrument. He suffers an early vanquishment at the hands of a Carter illusion (in concert with Houdini, Carter’s saviour) that exposes him as the fake and cruel individual he is.

From this moment Carter is on the way to the top of the magic chain, becoming one of the most successful magicians in America, and indeed, embarking on world conquest. All is not roses, however, and as his wife dies, and Carter enteres a slough of despondency, in which his shows become less successful and his profligacy great. He is in the search for the next great illusion constantly — to put him ahead of his competitors and, perhaps, fill a void. It is at this time he encounters Filo Farnsworth, arguably the inventor of television, and is won over to the beleaguered Farnsworth’s cause, for reasons that are not entirely transparent to the reader.

If this sounds like a lot in terms of plot, it’s because it is. Indeed, it is a shame that the structure of this novel, which has the ingredients to be a ripper, weren’t more tightly woven.

By way of examples of these loose structural threads, permit us to give three. First, Filo Farnsworth takes centre stage towards the end of the novel; in fact the latter third of the novel is filled with Carter’s attempts to save him from obscurity. Why does Carter invest so heavily in this minor character? We are not told, and it it certainly isn’t in keeping with the first third of the book. Second, Carter’s first wife dies in a terrible stage accident at the end of the first act. Her death haunts him, as well it might. But we, as the reader, had built little empathy for Mrs Carter’s character due to her scant appearance, found it difficult to invest too much emotion in her. The bouts of pathos and depression Carter repeatedly feels throughout the final third (some of which are terribly miserable) therefore do not land for us. Finally, Mysterioso, the terrible villain, naturally makes a third act resurgence, and we are rightly pleased when he is finally seen off. However, the absence of him, or even a mention of him, for the preceding (approx) 200 pages has stripped this victory of some of the justification one might ordinarily feel at this point.

Some, if not most of this is forgivable (It is a novel about magicians, not philosophers after all). And it is borne out of a genuine love of the subject matter: the research is palpable; there can be no mistake, Glen David Gold loves Vaudeville - and he can really transport you to that world. This really is a niche subject area too; we cannot find any other books that would hit the niche of magical historical fiction outside folklore, so Gold should be applauded for his bravery here. That said, some of the language can be awfully clumsy. Take, for example, this quote, occurring after the final vanquishment of Mysterioso: ‘the headlines the next day could—perhaps—easily be imagined’. However such shortcomings are minor — in the search for an authorial voice we are, none of us, without sin. And they do not detract from what is, on the whole, an enjoyable romp.

The novel’s shortcomings are minor - in the search for an authorial voice we are, none of us, without sin. And they do not detract from what is, on the whole, an enjoyable romp.

Overall, the sleight of hand the novel itself performs is revealing. There is misdirection, and the ending—which is in one sense inevitable—still manages to catch the reader slightly off guard, in a satisfying way. Gold’s story is undoubtedly assisted in its final curtain-pull and bang of flashpaper by the reader being confused by the novel’s being too long, and the confusing series of mini-plots and shifting focuses the novel contained, without quite having the sophistication to pull them all together in an entirely cohesive fashion.

Please don’t let that stop you picking this up, however. Watching Carter beat the Devil, finding out what did actually happen to Warren Harding, and being transported to the golden age of Vaudeville in Gold’s telling still makes Carter’s universe a happily habitable one.

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