Carter Beats the Devil
In August 1923, President Harding dies after attending a performance of stage illusionism given by Carter the Great. The capstone of the evening’s performance is an illusion about which all spectators are sworn to secrecy: “Carter Beats The Devil,” and as his last public act before his death, Harding has taken part in the illusion.
From this starting point, the book bounces from Charles Carter’s youth and early career through events of the near present, sometimes showing the same event several times from different points of view, unveiling twist after twist. The book is never sure what it wants to be–literary novel, pulp thriller, mystery, suspense novel, bildungsroman, romance–and while it intermittently seems to want to stake out Caleb Carr territory, a few elements are missing, like a willingness to tell the reader what– if any–criminal event has occurred.
Though the author is able to swamp the reader in a wealth of well-researched ‘20s San Francisco Bay Area trivia, all of the characters sport attitudes and vocabularies fresh from the 1990s, which shouldn’t bother most readers in the market this author is obviously aiming for: mainstream faux-historical blockbuster.
As this debut novel is lavishly produced and strongly marketed, Carter Beats The Devil, like its eponymous main character, may well be seen “everywhere,” but somehow this didn’t really strike me as a book that succeeded as–or was really intended as–a historical novel. I found it overlong for its material, and the combination of endless pulp-noir plot twists and constant high-canon literary disquisition is not a felicitous one, growing tiresome long before the book was over.
