We've all got one: that one book we adore, that we force on countless friends and relatives because we can't believe more people haven't read it. For me, it's Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold. I first read it years ago – it came out in 2001 – and I totally adore this story of the magician Charles Carter, which opens on 3 August 1923, the morning after the death of President Harding, who took part in Carter's act shortly before he died.
"Because the coroner's office could not explain exactly how Harding had died, and rumours were already starting, the men from Hearst wanted quite desperately to confirm what happened in the finale, when Carter beat the Devil," Gold writes. "That afternoon, a reporter disguised himself as a delivery man and interrupted Carter's close-up practice; the magician's more sardonic tendencies, unfortunately, came out. 'At the time the president met his maker, I was in a straightjacket, upside over a steaming pit of carbonic acid. In response to your as-yet-unasked query, yes, I do have an alibi.'"
It is wonderful; Peter Preston calls it "a book – a first novel, no less – to blow you away. It seeks to stun and amaze and deceive and, always, to entertain; and it seldom misses a trick in 600 pulsating pages."
Anyway – that's my underrated book. And you all should read it, if you haven't. I'm telling you about it because Entertainment Weekly has asked a handful of authors – Stephen King, George RR Martin, etc – for their own choices of underrated titles, and I always rather like seeing what I might be missing out on.
King goes for The Double by George Pelecanos, Headhunters by Jo Nesbo (he calls it "hilarious and creepy too"), and, intriguingly, Germinal by Émile Zola, "a terrific novel of a labor strike, as fresh now as it was a hundred years ago", he says.
GRRM highlights the Accursed Kings series by Maurice Druon – "All the good stuff that's in my books, minus the fantasy … but it actually happened" – and Jack Vance's wonderful fantasy novels. I love Vance too; Martin tells us that "his Dying Earth stories are classics of the genre, and by rights should be as well-known and widely–read as Tolkien and Howard".
Indeed. How can you not be tempted by his far future Earth, "a dim place, ancient beyond knowledge. Once it was a tall world of cloudy mountains and bright rivers, and the sun was a white blazing ball. Ages of rain and wind have beaten and rounded the granite, and the sun is feeble and red. The continents have sunk and risen. A million cities have lifted towers, have fallen to dust. In the place of the old peoples a few thousand strange souls live. There is evil on Earth, evil distilled by time … Earth is dying and in its twilight."
John Green, meanwhile, plumps on EW for titles including A Swift Pure Cry by the late Siobhan Dowd, Kindred by Octavia Butler and This Bloody Mary is the Last Thing I Own by Jonathan Rendall.
I've never read Butler, and I've been meaning to for ages, so I think I'm going to take his advice and go for Kindred. Unless you've got your own underrated masterpieces you want to tell us about? Please do share … and perhaps we can spread the word just a little more widely about them.
