Thunderstruck

Erik Larson takes two seemingly unrelated events - the invention of wireless telegraphy by the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi and the brutal murder of an American living in London - and weaves them together into a single narrative. In many ways, Thunderstruck is reminiscent of Devil in the White City. There, the protagonists are the architect Daniel Burham and the serial killer H.H. Holmes. (Larson appears to have more than a passing interest in "doctor"-murderers, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Marconi is a brilliant workaholic, a man with a plan, and one major flaw: he has no idea why he is able to transmit signals through the ether, only that he can. As a result, he spends a tremendous amount of time developing his system. He's also an egomaniac (raise your hand if that surprises you) and therefore unable to give credit where credit is dues. He makes a lot of enemies. And he's a terrible husband and father. His inventions did make possible radio, television, and the rescue of a few hundred souls from the Titanic.

Marconi would undoubtedly be peeved to know he is sharing space with Hawley Harvey Crippen, an unlikely murderer who happens to hail from Coldwater, Michigan, which just happens to be my grandfather's hometown. In any case, Crippen apparently murders his horrid wife, Cora Crippen aka Belle Elmore, and then attempts to escape to Canada with his mistress, Ethel Le Neve. They likely would have made it, too, if not for their ship's ability to hail Scotland Yard from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As an aside, it's clear that if Crippen did kill Cora - and if Wikipedia is to be believed, it's not entirely certain he did - the question is not why, but what took him so long?

Giving life to the minutiae, from a minute-by-minute, passenger-by-passenger recounting of the sinking of the Lusitania to the travails of building telegraphy stations at the far reaches of two continents, is what Larson does best. Although I can't claim this is my favorite Larson book (In the Garden of Beasts, the first one I read, still holds that title), Thunderstruck is another outstanding piece of work.