Pulling history out of a hat

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."

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