Glen David Gold's first novel is about illusion, in particular a minor American master of it. It is also about US President Warren Harding and his untimely end, the legendary borax multimillionaire, Frank "Borax" Smith, Harry Houdini, Disappearing Elephants and other illusions, a secret service agent at the end of his dismal career, Indonesian pirates, the inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth, and a host of other personalities and key events in the first two decades of the last century.
It is history coloured by a wonderfully fertile imagination, it is a wry-humoured whodunit with a dazzling sense of suspense, it is a romantic tribute to a different age and, at its heart, it is a moving testament to the power of love over loneliness.
In other words, Gold's appetite for merging fact with fiction, for interweaving theme with theme, is awesome and so is his tendency to shift his narrative in time. The result could have been a mess. But, in the finest traditions of magic, his timing and touch are immaculate as he creates one of the most diverting reads of the year, a book that intrigues and consumes attention with the ease of a master illusionist.
Gold's central figure is Charles Carter, a minor American magician from San Francisco, who shuns his Ivy League background to follow his love of magic and illusion through the small theatres and backwaters of the vaudeville circuit as he climbs the ladder to heading the bill. And the central occasion, the moment on which the whole book pivots, is the death of President Warren G. Harding in a San Franciscan hotel late on August 2nd, 1923, two hours after his attendance at and participation in Carter the Great Beats the Devil, a daring illusion in which the magician takes on the devil.
Harding is a troubled man, on the verge of impeachment for a rake of dodgy deals and shady practices, at odds with his wife over a series of infidelities, and the keeper of information that others in the administration want kept secret. But in the few minutes alone with Carter when the magician explained what the president would do, did Harding reveal what was at the heart of his worries?
Some worry that he did and set out after our hero, while others wonder did Carter the Great do something in that secret magical ritual that somehow helped bring Harding's life to a premature end?
The story is set but Gold is not satisfied to follow a predictable route. Instead, he shuffles down sideroads creating fascinating characters and building canny subplots aplenty. It is simply brilliant the way in which he manages to hang all this together, never showing the joins in the magic of his prose and plot.
The tone is by times fearful, intriguing, emotional (chapter 19 is beautifully tender), humorous and confounding, but whatever it is, Carter Beats the Devil is never less than wonderfully entertaining.
Joe Breen is an Irish Times journalist