EL: One of the biggest challenges for me was dealing with Edwardian London, because as an American, I have an intuitive sense of American history and American cities, so in my previous book, when I had to deal with trying to conjure Chicago, I began with a certain set of constructs that made sense to me about American cities. Not the case going over to London. I was kind of concerned about getting up to speed on London. One way, obviously, is just to read everything you conceivably can. And one real benefit to London is that a lot of things I talk about in the book are still there. You can walk by and see them and touch them. You see an address and see buildings that existed at the time and so forth, and that's a real powerful thing.
But I also tried to pull in a lot of far-flung bits and pieces from all kinds of sources to make things come alive. I'm usually not big on web sources, but there were a couple of websites I found just amazing for exactly this purpose of trying to get a sense of what London was like. One of them is called The Bolles Collection. It's put up by Tufts University and it's an amazing site. What they did was, they scanned or entered into their database a lot of books that were published in the 1890s, and a couple from the 1900s, that were walking guides to the city. Not walking guides like you come across today, like Fodor's. These were literate, essay-ish walks through London, full of real deep history. Somebody would talk about a street in Bloomsbury and its Elizabethan origins. You can type an address into the search engine at the website and come up with all these citations telling you about that street. Not just the history, but what it looked like at the time. That was amazingly powerful. It's as if you're sitting there talking to this guy as he's walking through that area in London. Sort of like a time machine.
Even more powerful was The Charles Booth Online Archive. He was a reformer back in the 1890s who didn't really believe that London could possibly be as impoverished as the socialists were saying. So he set out on his own to do a street-by-street survey to find out just how poor London was, and he found, much to his amazement, that it was much poorer. He'd accompany policemen on their beats, and accompany school bureau agents who were required to keep tabs on people within specific blocks in London, and wherever he and his investigators went, they took detailed notes, some of which were actually photographed and placed in this website. Among those places, for example, was Hilldrop Crescent, where Crippen and Belle lived during the climactic moments of the book.
So there's a marvelous window. I have this guy walking through the neighborhood, taking notes about what he's seeing, and what he's seeing in the neighboring areas, and the history of the cattle market, and the lore and so forth. When you bring all that together, you can really capture through sheer detail a sense of the time. You can't make anything up, but the more detail you have, and the more you juxtapose one detail against another, I think you can really conjure something.
AVC: What's your fascination with this era in particular? You've written three books in a row set around the turn of the last century.
EL: Isaac's Storm was the first book, and it wasn't the era that drew me, it was the hurricane. It wasn't the era that drew me The Devil In The White City, it just happened to be the era where the events took place. It's not like I'm so drawn to this era that it's the only place I want to do books. It's just happenstance.
But I think there is a common thread. That particular era, the late Victorian/early Edwardian, is just very compelling in itself. It's a time when people didn't sense limits. The modern world was still very brand-new, and they believed they could do anything. There's this almost childlike sense of charm and humor. Look at the World's Fair of 1893. There's no reason those guys should have taken that on. No reason. It was insane to think they could possibly do it, but they did. It's the same way with Marconi. There was no reason for him to think, truly, in terms of physical law, that he could actually send telegraphic signals long distance, let alone over the horizon. Nothing. The leading physicists of the age doubted completely that anything like that was possible. But he had this conception, and believed in his heart of hearts that he could do it, and he went ahead and did it. That's one of the remarkable things about that period. Just that sense that you can do anything you set your mind to. Panama Canal. The New York subway system. Whatever.
AVC: When you watch movies that are set in that time period, since you've done so much research, are you mentally correcting the filmmakers?
EL: I think there's a tendency to conceive of the era in kind of stereotypical ways that are easier to sell to an audience. You have all the clothes, and people sort of talk funny and so forth. But the more I read about the period, the more I find interesting parallels with ours. There's this widespread belief that in the Victorian era, there was no sex, but what I find repeatedly in my research is that sex was going on everywhere. The only difference was, they didn't talk about it. Especially in the Edwardian period. You have these country houses where the mistress of the house would place a guy in the bedroom next to a particular woman because she knew they had an affinity for each other, and knew that sparks would fly and doors would open and things would happen. This was commonplace. The sense of illicit sex.
Another element is marriage. Thunderstruck to a significant degree is a portrait of middle-class marriage and its decay. Right down to the details of the elephant's-feet tables and pink décor. All these little details of real life that no one is going to put into a movie about the era, because it just doesn't seem like it fits. Whenever I see a period film, I'm always taken aback at how stereotypical the action seems. The décor. The characters. But you know, Tesla used the word "television" in 1900. The real world back in the 1890s through 1910 was a lot weirder, funkier, more sophisticated, and contemporary in outlook and action than we typically give credit.
AVC: Back when you first started as a reporter, did you have an eye toward writing non-fiction books?
EL: Never. No, I'm a failed novelist. When I first started in journalism, it was because I wanted to have a day job that paid, so I could make a living writing. I always had a novel I was working on. In fact, I've written four complete mystery novels. Five if you include the one I wrote when I was 13. Seventy-five pages long, one sex scene. I didn't know what sex was, but it was great. Four complete novels, two of which were under contract. But what happened was, my non-fiction career sort of sped past my fiction career. The determination was made by me and through guidance from my editor, who said, "You know, the non-fiction is so much better. Why do you want to put out a mediocre novel?" And after I got into writing about history as an interesting way of telling true stories, I found it infinitely satisfying. I have absolutely no interest in writing novels any more.
AVC: Since being a writer is such a solitary career, do you enjoy doing book tours and meeting your readers?
EL: I like some parts of the tour. I love the old hotels, the new hotels, the great hotels. You want to know my least favorite thing? Going into a bookstore and finding like four people there. My most favorite thing is going into a bookstore and finding like a hundred people there. I love meeting my public if there is a public. It's when there isn't a public that I feel like, "Oh my God, nobody likes my book." If there's like four people in the bookstore, I somehow feel less worthy.
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