Thunderstruck

Erik Larson

Crown

480 Pages

 

Erik Larson has done it again. In Thunderstruck, just as in his last book, The Devil in the White City, he has taken an unlikely historical subject and spun it into gold. The formula is simple enough, though the finished books verge on alchemy. The only question is whether we’re getting true magic or mere sleight of hand.

In The Devil in the White City, Larson started with the story of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and mixed in the tale of a ghoulish serial murderer. In Thunderstruck, he has seized on the long, bitter competition to perfect the technology of radio and combined it with another grisly turn-of-the-century murder, the infamous “Crippen case.”

To point out the similarity between these books is by no means to denigrate the craft or the labor that went into them. Larson is a marvelous writer, and he has done prodigious research for Thunderstruck, even going so far as to learn Italian. He’s a master of the telling detail, finding just the right ones to help define an age and a place — in this instance, late Victorian and Edwardian England. Thus we learn that Nikola Tesla was already using the word “television” in 1900; that by the 1890’s Britain was so concerned about the ability of its male population to serve in the armed forces that an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was appointed to look into the matter; that British customs officials, on the lookout for bombs “or other devices capable of placing the queen at risk,” managed to destroy Guglielmo Marconi’s radio apparatus when he first brought it to England.

Larson further excels at explaining immensely complicated scientific concepts in ways the most clueless layman (that would be me) can understand. Best of all, he’s superb at creating characters with a few short strokes. In Thunderstruck, he has a wonderful assortment to work with.

There is, first of all, Marconi himself, the 21-year-old prodigy who burst on London with his gizmo in 1896. This wasn’t the most auspicious moment for a half-Irish, half-Italian unknown to announce that he had bested some of the empire’s greatest scientific minds. Britain was suffering a general crisis of confidence and working its way into a state of collective paranoia over the Kaiser’s saber-rattling.

Marconi was received with fairness in some quarters, but his attempt to win a British patent for his invention was robustly opposed by the adherents of Oliver Lodge, an imposing professor of physics at the University College of Liverpool, who had already demonstrated an ability to project electromagnetic waves partway across a room and who might have been hailed for this discovery well before Marconi, save for his detour into the world of mediums and séances. Lodge didn’t yield his ground willingly, and his allies and other indignant Englishmen subjected Marconi to regular insinuations of fraud, lawsuits and nasty letters to The Times of London — even an attempt by a professional magician to disrupt one of Marconi’s public demonstrations. Obstacles were also posed by the Kaiser, whose agents tried to heist the entire technology.

Then there were those who doubted the need for radio in the first place, since the telegraph was already ubiquitous. Marconi’s salient achievement was to realize that radio waves could be transmitted across vast distances, an incalculable step forward in mass communications. Yet he was hindered both by his lack of a strong theoretical background (he worked to a remarkable degree by intuition and trial and error) and by what Larson calls a “social obtuseness that made him oblivious to how his actions affected others.” Ruthless, emotionally distant and incorrigibly flirtatious, Marconi was adept at offending his closest allies while toiling single-mindedly to build ever bigger, more powerful transmitters that would secure his patent once and for all — by broadcasting signals all the way across the Atlantic. Larson generally makes Marconi’s tribulations enthralling, even if he sometimes goes on too long in describing the preparations and setbacks.

Crosscut with the inventor’s story is that of a very different man, Hawley Harvey Crippen, a Michigan-born doctor of sorts who washed up in London a year after Marconi. Crippen was one half of that comedy perennial, a milquetoast husband mercilessly henpecked by a voracious, overbearing mate — in his case, a zaftig shrew with expensive tastes and thwarted show-business ambitions. This rather pathetic, long-running domestic farce was finally shuttered when Crippen managed to win the affection of a more sympathetic young woman at his office. Mrs. Crippen’s fate was sealed — in a very macabre fashion.

The Crippen case was a sensation in its time and, as Larson points out, would have a great influence on popular detective fiction and movies in the century to come. But what does all this have to do with Marconi and the radio? When Crippen and his paramour tried to flee to Canada, the ship’s captain recognized them from newspaper photos and secretly radioed the information to his superiors in Liverpool, who relayed it straight to Scotland Yard. More radio telegrams flew back and forth over the ocean, and the news was then forwarded by telegraph cables until “the front pages of newspapers around the world” were following the story of the oblivious fugitive couple and the pursuit of their ocean liner by a detective from the Yard, aboard a fast steamer. For readers, Larson reports, this chase was “magic,” adding that “the Crippen saga did more to accelerate the acceptance of wireless as a practical tool than anything the Marconi company previously had attempted.”

And yet, you can’t avoid the suspicion that these two stories have been linked mostly for the chance to throw in a lurid murder — a dollop of the old ultraviolence to help the history go down. As Larson himself acknowledges, before the Crippen case radio had already been established as the only useful means of communication for oceangoing vessels, and its status was soon to be dramatically confirmed by the Titanic disaster and the submarine warfare of World War I.

The connection seems still more forced by the way Larson alternates his chapters about Marconi and Crippen, making it seem as if he’s writing about concurrent events when they’re sometimes separated by as many as seven or eight years. This isn’t quite as dubious as the device he resorted to in “The Devil in the White City” when he described the mental workings and minute-by-minute details in the life of that book’s killer, only to reveal in footnotes that he had “constructed” such scenes. But it does have the whiff of something slightly fraudulent.

Larson’s books have helped galvanize an entire publishing genre, euphemistically labeled “narrative nonfiction” or “narrative history” — with narrative in this instance defined as “bloody murder.” This is history via the Grand Guignol, literature by vivisection; a concession that the past is all a big, unmarketable bore if you can’t enliven it with a juicy murder. Its counterpart is fiction in which great historical figures (Freud, Teddy Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes) are pressed into service solving murder mysteries.

Readers deserve better than this, and Larson can deliver it, as he showed in Isaac’s Storm, his outstanding account of the Galveston hurricane of 1900. It would be gratifying to see him turn his considerable skills once again to a compelling historical narrative — straight up, no blood chaser.