Author Erik Larson spent decades as a cultural affairs and business reporter and part-time unpublished mystery writer before he turned to historical non-fiction with 1999's Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, And The Deadliest Hurricane In History, a gripping account of how one meteorologist failed to predict the 1900 Galveston hurricane. Larson followed that book with the bestseller The Devil And The White City: Murder, Magic, And Madness At The Fair That Changed America, another turn-of-the-century saga, intertwining the improbable tale of how the 1893 Chicago World's Fair came to be with the mystery of a prolific serial killer who used the fair to scout his victims. Larson spoke with The A.V. Club about his latest book, Thunderstruck—no subtitle—which links up one of the most notorious murders of the early 20th century with the rapidly shifting fortunes of wireless telegraphy inventor Guglielmo Marconi.
The A.V. Club: Why doesn't Thunderstruck have a subtitle?
Erik Larson: [Laughs.] Thank you for noticing. My family will be in hysterics that you asked me that, and I'll tell you why. On Sunday mornings, I go through the bestseller lists, and I always check the New York Times book-review index to see what's coming down the pike. You have the little fiction list at the top, which may have six books, and it's like six lines. Then you have the non-fiction part, and it has six books and 20 lines. And some of these subtitles are hysterical. I'll read them out loud to my kids. "This isn't a subtitle, it's the first paragraph." I said to my editor, "We're going to zig while everyone else is zagging." No subtitle. It took a little effort to get everyone to agree, but they did, God bless them.
AVC: How do you stumble across the bizarrely connected historical stories you keep writing about?
EL: Trying to find ideas is the hardest part of my job. You'd think it would be the most fun. Just sitting around reading whatever I want, going to cafés and libraries. But I always feel so unproductive. I think I was raised too well by my parents.
For Thunderstruck, I discarded about a dozen ideas. And then one afternoon, I was thinking about wireless. I don't know why. I guess because it's become so ubiquitous. I was thinking that maybe there's something I could do about the origin of wireless, so I did what any self-respecting person does these days: I Googled "wireless." I came up with about six million websites before I hit one called Marconi Calling, which was put up by Marconi PLC, the last vestige of Marconi's company in Britain. I was going through the directory on this website, and came to the name Hawley Harvey Crippen. I was really startled, because I had absolutely no idea what connection this guy could have with wireless.
I knew the name Crippen because back in the '60s, when I was a kid, I'd been told about him by my mother, who was a real mystery junkie and sometime mystery writer. I can even tell you where in my house I was when I heard about it. She didn't tell me too many details about what he'd done, but there was this aura of grisly romance that I held onto all these years. Periodically, I'd hear or read something about Crippen, and that same aura would flare back up. And here it was on this website about wireless. So I started reading about the connection, reading about this transatlantic chase with two ocean liners. That by itself was enough for me to think that maybe there was something to putting both these stories in one book.
AVC: There's a lot of digression and period detail in your books, but none of it seems extraneous. Do you pick and choose the historical items that fit into your larger theme?
EL: Digression is my passion. I'm not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten, and that are kind of surprising. The problem is, how do you pare stories away so that the book doesn't become a distracting jumble of material, and readers lose focus? In my experience, there's really only one way to do that. I pack it all in with the rough draft, then count on myself and my trusted readers to tell me what's good and what's not good.
My secret weapon is my wife. She's the best judge. She's a scientist, and a natural reader. We've developed a detailed code for how she marks a manuscript, and I think it's what saves me from wild digressions. She'll have in the margins an up arrow, which means "really good." I know from experience that stays no matter what. Then she'll have a down arrow someplace, and I've learned from experience, I have to cut that, because there's no point in even trying to rehabilitate it. It's just lousy. Unfortunately, there's a lot of those down arrows when the manuscript is in the rough-draft phase. Then she gets more into the subtleties, which I value the most of all. She'll have a smiley face, which means something is funny or made her smile. Then she'll have a sad face, which means something moved her enough to make her feel sad, which is very important. When you're spending several years doing the research on a book, you forget the emotional power of the thing you're writing about, and you need to be reminded. Seeing a sad face in the margin is really good for me, because it restores the faith that I had when I first encountered whatever story I'm writing about. Then come the receding series of Zs in the margins, and that's where I'm somewhat appalled, but I know from experience, I just have to accept it.
AVC: Given how much your books rely on little cliffhangers and an overall sense of mystery, how much of the structure has to be in place in that first draft?
EL: The rough draft is a broad outline of where one narrative should stop and where the other narrative should pick up. The final structure can't be done until that complete rough draft is done. Then comes the part that's a love/hate thing. I think I really love it, but it's hard. I know my wife hates it. To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure. At that point, I'm ready for the final write-through. That's the part I adore above all, because at that point, you're confident. You've got the book. You know exactly what you've got to do each day. To me, that's pure fun.
AVC: You're really good at capturing mood, which wouldn't seem that difficult, except you're dealing with scenes that are more than 100 years old. How do you research the feel of a city street in 1890?
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