Never trust a narrator who proclaims within the first few pages that his memory has yet to fail him. Though he had been directly involved in the two most famous murder cases of his time, the thrills of Dew's book, as I recall, had less to do with the information it contained than with the delicious unreliability of his tone, which asserted itself almost instantly. I Caught Crippen was the memoir of a policeman named Walter Dew, who, as questionable luck would have it, saw on one of his earliest rounds the last victim of Jack the Ripper and who retired soon after the claim to fame described in his title (the book was written in 1938). Along the way, he tells of a sad and tragic love affair that was described on the front pages of newspapers around the world, a chief inspector who found himself strangely sympathetic to the killer and his lover, and a driven and compelling inventor who transformed the way we communicate.Many years ago, I came across a book that seemed an exquisite find. With his unparalleled narrative skills, Erik Larson guides us through a relentlessly suspenseful chase over the waters of the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, Crippen, “the kindest of men,” nearly commits the perfect murder. Against this background, Marconi races against incredible odds and relentless skepticism to perfect his invention: the wireless, a prime catalyst for the emergence of the world we know today.
Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy coasts of Cornwall, Cape Cod, and Nova Scotia, Thunderstruck evokes the dynamism of those years when great shipping companies competed to build the biggest, fastest ocean liners scientific advances dazzled the public with visions of a world transformed and the rich outdid one another with ostentatious displays of wealth. In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men-Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication-whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world’s “great hush.”
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