Carter Beats the Devil
Oct. 6th, 2009 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
essentialsaltesThe one-and-only ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
richardabecker kindly sent me this book some weeks back, and I finally got around to it. Set primarily in 1920's San Francisco, the book takes Carter the Great, the death of President Harding, and a somewhat silly MacGuffin, and mooshes them into a pulpy action-mystery with stage magic, escape artistry, Feds, thugs, pirates and a thousand elephants (well, one or two).
Definitely a fun book, and lots of interesting detail on the stage magic of the day. The MacGuffininess of the MacGuffin and some of the other elements of the uberplot are a little hard to swallow, but if you leap into it with two pulpy fists swinging, err... eyes reading? then that won't bother you too much.
Makes a good fictional counterpart to Hiding the Elephant, which I adored.
richardabecker kindly sent me this book some weeks back, and I finally got around to it. Set primarily in 1920's San Francisco, the book takes Carter the Great, the death of President Harding, and a somewhat silly MacGuffin, and mooshes them into a pulpy action-mystery with stage magic, escape artistry, Feds, thugs, pirates and a thousand elephants (well, one or two).Definitely a fun book, and lots of interesting detail on the stage magic of the day. The MacGuffininess of the MacGuffin and some of the other elements of the uberplot are a little hard to swallow, but if you leap into it with two pulpy fists swinging, err... eyes reading? then that won't bother you too much.
Makes a good fictional counterpart to Hiding the Elephant, which I adored.
