Putting two compelling tales in a blender

by David Loftus

[A version of this review appeared in the
Oregonian on November 12, 2006.]

Erik Larson knows how to tell a ripping good yarns.

That subject-verb disagreement is deliberate: whether you like Larson's books may depend on how plausible you find his constructions.

His new book repeats the formula of his bestseller, The Devil in the White City -- which mated two different, equally fascinating narratives that may not have had a lot to do with each other.

The formula consists of the development of some new technology or other expression of modernity, and murder most foul.

In Devil, it was the construction of a world's fair (and all the personalities -- architects, engineers, financiers, city officials, laborers -- involved), and the emergence of one of the first known serial killers.

Thunderstruck examines the development of wireless communication -- Marconi, his many collaborators and competitors, and his personal quirks -- coupled with the monstrous crime of mild-mannered, likable Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Crippen's 1910 murder of his domineering, spendthrift wife, though it would fascinate Raymond Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock (who used elements of the story in Rope, Rear Window, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents), is just distant enough in historical memory that most of Larson's readers may not be familiar with it.

A native of Michigan, Crippen's medical training as a homeopathist was somewhat haphazard, and he often worked as an expert/sales consultant for quack medicine companies, but no one ever had anything bad to say about him as a person.

Public opinion turned against this henpecked mouse of a gentleman only after people learned he had removed the head, hands, feet, and all the bones from his wife's body -- none of which were ever found -- before burying the flesh and viscera in the coal cellar of their north London home.

The hook for Larson's 400-page opus is that when the killer and his innocent mistress left England on an ocean liner, the recent invention of wireless enabled the entire world to follow reports of a Scotland Yard detective's pursuit in a faster ship, to beat the unaware couple to Quebec and arrest Crippen on arrival.

Would Crippen have been caught if an alert ship captain had not done a little detective work and alerted the authorities by wireless? Difficult to say. But Larson uses this connection as an excuse to tell the story of Marconi, which is admittedly gripping on its own: beautiful women, lavish lifestyle, British racism, scientific shots in the dark, lawsuits, competitors' sniping, death of children, divorce, and a Nobel Prize.

Larson is a facile, engaging writer who sometimes indulges in jarring metaphors and similes (carriages in a London street "gave it the look of a great black seam of coal," expenses increased "like yeast in a warm oven"); amplifies interest in an inherently enthralling story ("a miscalculation that would prove costly," a "daring declaration" that would prove "most unwise"); and struggles to legitimize his narrative ("two wildly disparate stories, whose collision . . . would exert influence on the world for a century to come").

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