As a longtime contributor to a variety of publications, including Time Magazine, the New Yorker and Harper's , American writer Erik Larson has a knack for mixing fact and fiction.
When both his first novel, Isaac's Storm (1999), and the follow-up best-seller The Devil in White City (2003) captured the vivid imaginations of readers hungry for the mysteries of history, the author and his publisher knew they had struck gold.
Thunderstruck is Larson's latest work and tells the real-life story of two men whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of modern times.
Guglielmo Marconi is the passionate creator of telegraphy and radio. Driven at first by the curiosity of scientific inquiry, the inventor soon becomes obsessed and overwhelmed with fame and fortune. In an effort to silence his critics once and for all, Marconi rushes to establish the world's first wireless Trans-Atlantic telecommunications system.
Hawley Harvey Crippen is the quiet and unassuming American physician. With an unhappy marriage to a starry-eyed wife breaking down, the diminutive doctor prescribes a geographical cure to treat their ailing bond, relocating the couple to the suburbs of industrial London. In an effort to silence his overbearing spouse, Crippen quietly dissects and disposes of her body, before taking up with his young secretary, Ethel le Neve.
Marconi's rise to renown has been well chronicled, especially in Atlantic Canada where he did much of his research. The second son of an Italian landowner and Irish mother, the brash youngster was fascinated with electricity during his early years. Building and using his own equipment, Marconi's experiments with electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) mirrored those taking place across other parts of Europe at the same time. Though his ideas did evoke broad interest from both the scientific and financial communities, full public and commercial acceptance remained elusive.
Crippen's fall from grace is lesser known. Born in Coldwater, Michigan, he studied homeopathy before juggling several positions in the field of pharmaceutical medicine throughout the 1890's. By the turn of the century, Crippen had moved overseas with his second wife, the difficult Cora Turner (aka Belle Elmore.) Though her ambitions for the Opera failed in frustration, Elmore's lack of talent was offset by ambition, and her numerous off-stage affairs soon drove her belittled husband first to distraction and, finally, to action.
It is at this point that Larson carefully, and brilliantly, weaves these two very different lives together.
After Crippen butchers and buries Belle in his basement, he and le Neve leave the scene of the crime for Continental Europe, eventually boarding a small liner for Canada.
With detectives from New Scotland Yard in pursuit, reports of the couple's cross-Atlantic getaway become news of the world, with Marconi's emerging technology enabling the broadcast of daily events to growing markets. Traveling incognito and under pseudonym, the lovers are oblivious to the wireless reports of their unfolding fate, now crossing the ocean by the hour. With the eyes and ears of the world as witness to the both the chase, and the new tools that allow for its broadband experience, the ship is eventually overtaken along the St. Lawrence River, with Crippen and le Neve arrested before a mob of reporters and photographers.
Crippen's ensuing trial and execution only further enhance Marconi's now mythical repute, forever cementing his legacy in both the public eye and the financial sector.
Given that truth is stranger than fiction, Larson has woven a stirring and cohesive masterpiece with a strong mélange of murder, mystery, history, psychology and stone-cold fact.
The author is extremely thorough in his research and leaves no stone unturned. Though at times the work bogs down under the weight of historical evidence, the fact-finding does prove itself vital, timely coming to light as suspense heightens. Even speculative theories on the infamous "Cellar Murder" are propped up with probability.
As such, the writing is necessarily clear and concise, effectively condensing the enormous amount of empirical data into a compelling drama.
Perhaps most impressive, however, is Larson's portrait of the era, made complete with detailed passages on the architecture, foundries, clothing and literature of the times. Likewise, his colourful characterization of the many marginal players surrounding Marconi and Crippen help bring history to life, making Thunderstruck as entertaining a read as it is enlightening.
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