Courtesy Crown Publishers
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Thunderstruck
By Erik Larson (Crown Publishers)
Review by Daniel Stashower, November 2006
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Okay, I'll admit it: I was skeptical.
In his previous book, the nonfiction bestseller The Devil in the White City, author Erik Larson took the stories of two very disparate characters—one an innovator, the other a murderer—and wove them together into a seamlessly compelling narrative. In his new book, Thunderstruck, he returns to this winning formula. If anything, it works even better the second time around. Thunderstruck draws on the contrasting stories of Guglielmo Marconi, the young pioneer of wireless telegraphy, and Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, the notorious but oddly sympathetic villain of the infamous North London Cellar Murder of 1910. Once again, Larson skillfully plays the two narratives against one another until they converge in a dramatic and unexpected way.
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Though Marconi's name is well known, the story behind the invention of the "radio-telegraph" is not. Larson chronicles not only the laborious trial and error that enabled the young Italian to make his breakthrough but also the equally difficult struggle to reap its rewards. The saga begins in September of 1895, as Marconi manages to transmit a wireless signal over a distance of some 1,500 yards—or beyond the line of sight—a goal that had eluded many far better-qualified scientists. "At that moment the world changed," Larson writes, "though a good deal of time and turmoil would have to pass before anyone was able to appreciate the true meaning of what had just occurred."
In a very different way Dr. H. H. Crippen also captured the attention of the world. In contrast to the ambitious, driven Marconi, Crippen was by all accounts a quiet and very gentle spirit—"as docile a kitten," one friend recalled. Nevertheless, in the early months of 1910, Crippen murdered his wife and disposed of her remains in a manner that caused a sensation—the body was not only stripped of its skin, but the head, limbs and even the bones were nowhere to be found. "There has never been a hue and cry like that which went up throughout the country for Crippen…" wrote Chief Inspector Walter Dew, who took charge of the case. Scotland Yard launched a manhunt on a scale that rivaled the search for Jack the Ripper.
Hoping to evade capture, Crippen boarded an ocean liner bound for Canada. In earlier days his escape would have been certain, but now—thanks to an alert ship's captain and his newly installed Marconi apparatus—Crippen's movements were not only detected but broadcast to a waiting world. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic ran breathless reports, featuring maps that showed the relative positions of Crippen's ship and a second liner carrying Inspector Dew, his dogged pursuer. The writer J. B. Priestly likened the transatlantic chase to a "new, exciting, entirely original drama: Trapped by Wireless!" Only Crippen himself, strolling the decks in the company of his young mistress, remained unaware of the sensation he had caused.
Larson has a great deal of fun with the adventure on the high seas, but ultimately the book has a more ambitious agenda: "By chronicling the converging stories of a killer and an inventor," the author writes, "I hope to present a fresh portrait of the period 1900 to 1910, when Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. 'It doesn't matter what you do,' he said, 'so long as you don't frighten the horses.' "
I can't speak for the horses, but Larson gives the reader one terrific ride.
Daniel Stashower is the author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder, published by Dutton (2006).
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