Source of book: Audiobook and book borrowed from the library
For the last several years, my wife and I have attended the Utah Shakespeare Festival - she went long before I did, with a friend. Regular readers of this blog may look forward to my usual post in July or August about the plays we saw.
This post is tangentially connected to the USF. Usually, we try to listen to an audiobook on our drive out and back. Because this is my wife’s gig, she typically chooses the book, and that usually happens the day of the trip.
Sometimes, this works out well - we finish the book, and I write about it when I get back.
But back in 2023, the timing was all off, and I ended up missing the last 80 or so pages of the book. I always intended to finish it, but time got away from me.
Because of another audiobook I didn’t finish on a recent trip, I decided to just go ahead and put in a request for the various unfinished books, and just get them done.
That is the story behind Thunderstruck.
So, two and a half years later, here is the post about the book.
Larson, as he apparently does in others of his books, combines two stories, one at the world-shaking level, and one at a more personal level. These stories interweave, and are told in a “novelistic” style (similar but not the same as “literary nonfiction) but with fidelity to the known facts. This is not historical fiction - in fact, even the quotes are all sourced from primary documents rather than imagined - but a telling of a true story with the feel of a novel.
In Thunderstruck, that means we get the story of Marconi’s development of wireless technology combined with the rather lurid murder of Belle Elmore (one of several aliases) by her husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen.
How are these two connected? Well, when Crippen attempted to flee to Canada with his mistress, the wireless telegraph enabled the captain of the ship he was on to notify Scotland Yard and facilitate the arrest. It was the first arrest made with the aid of the wireless - although it would definitely not be the last.
Between the Marconi story and the Crippen story, there is plenty of material to make up a book. Marconi himself (like Edison and other well-known figures) didn’t invent the technology he is credited with. Rather, others laid the foundation and even made the first successful experiments. It was Marconi who first made a commercial success of the technology, thus gaining the credit - and the profits.
I was gratified to see Oliver Lodge in particular get his due credit in this book, and not just because of his connection to my Wedgwood ancestors. Like Tesla, one wonders what might have been had he hired better attorneys.
While there was a good bit more detail about Marconi and the history of wireless development in this book than I had read in any other single place, this was an area that I was pretty familiar with - I have been fascinated with all things electrical since childhood. (You can read about my favorite non-fiction book from my grade-school days here.)
On the other hand, I was definitely not at all familiar with the Crippen case.
The thing about that case, though, is that even though it never became a household name (like, say, Lizzie Borden) the elements of the crime have found their way into books and movies and television shows ever since. You will certainly recognize them.
I was also struck by the fact that the investigation and the evidence were a total mess. There are gaping holes everywhere, the “science” part seems dubious, and even today, there are those who question the official story.
The one thing that can be said with certainty is that Crippen had the motive and the opportunity to kill his wife, and sure acted guiltily enough. I am no expert, but it seems to me that the evidence strongly suggests that he did kill his wife, but the specifics were quite possibly different than the official story.
So, to start with, Crippen was an American grifter - a homeopathic “physician” who took to selling snake oil. After his first wife died, he took up with Belle Elmore, a dance hall singer and personality. At least, that was her stage name. There are several other names she appears to have used. And she always had a stable of boy toys on the side, it appears.
The Crippens moved to London, to manage a branch of his partner’s snake oil business. After that broke up, he struggled to make sufficient income, relying to a degree on Belle’s singing.
Crippen took on a secretary, Ethel Le Neve, who soon became his mistress.
After years of fighting and general unpleasantness, Belle disappeared. It was generally thought that she ran off with her lover, who disappeared at the same time.
But Belle’s fellow performers smelled a rat, and kept pressuring the police to investigate. They were unable to find anything amiss, however.
Crippen got spooked, however, and fled to Belgium with Le Neve. The police decided to look harder, and eventually dug under the cellar, finding human remains that they believed were Belle’s.
Crippen and Le Neve boarded a ship bound for Canada, with her disguised as a boy, the captain was suspicious, and the rest is history.
You can probably see the elements of a lurid crime fiction trope already. The buried body, the inconvenient spouse and new mistress, etc. There are others I didn’t mention: the use of quicklime to dissolve the body (which didn’t work), the dismemberment, a rare poison known to a doctor, use of a scar to identify the remains - there is a lot going on here.
I believe some of this was more hype than fact, though. The alleged scar was contested in court, which is a fascinating issue for us lawyer sorts. The toxicology was primitive at best, and the handling of the remains would likely not hold up in a modern courtroom. But this was 1910, so things were different. (Also, the British court system is a lot different than ours - Crippen was required to testify, and his testimony probably got him convicted where the evidence might not have.)
To me, though, the biggest questions raised about the holes in the official story were raised by none other than Raymond Chandler, the famous Crime Noir writer.
The remains found were all from the torso of the deceased. The head, limbs, and indeed the skeleton were not there. So, someone would have had to do a very careful dismemberment and dispose of most of the corpse before burying just a bit of it. Why? And also, how? Despite attempts, no head, limbs, or bones were ever discovered. And if one could dispose of all that, why not just dispose of the whole thing? Why bother with burying any of it in the basement?
What seems more likely to Chandler (and to me) is that if Crippen did kill Belle, using the drug he was known to have had available, he probably just disposed of the whole body somewhere else. And whatever was in the basement was…someone else altogether, and maybe not even connected to Crippen at all.
(The fact that requests to test the evidence for DNA connection have been denied feeds the suspicion that this was a problematic case.)
What an Edwardian muddle, so to speak: all the lurid details of Victorian Gothic, combined with new but primitive forensic tools and a lack of consistent procedure and protocol to ensure their accuracy.
Larson makes the parallel stories quite compelling. His writing style is closer to that of a novelist than the usual non-fiction writer. This makes things a bit breezy, but he backs it up with a tremendous amount of research and primary-source detail. For example, he read the entire case file, the transcripts, and connected material. He read the letters and writings of the various people involved, from Marconi to Ethel Le Neve to the detective who cracked the case.
As I mentioned, unlike a historical fiction writer, he invents no conversations - the actual words of the people involved have been located and placed in the correct point in the narrative. It’s impressive work - and I enjoyed Larson’s bit at the end about where he found his sources.
I’m not sure I would have chosen this book based on the topic, but I was drawn in, and did want to go back and finish it. I’m glad I did.
I have had various Larson books recommended to me by friends, so I may have to put those on the list.
I don’t remember enough about the audiobook itself to say anything about it. I assume it was okay, or I would have remembered it was problematic.
