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A review by jwsg
The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession by David Grann
4.0
I’d just finished John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 before picking up David Grann’s The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. The connection between the two being their writing for The New Yorker. 9 out of the 12 stories in this collection were published in The New Yorker previously (the other 3 having been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic and the NYT Magazine). I don’t read The New Yorker regularly but what I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed. So naturally, I whizzed through Grann’s collection.
McPhee writes on a wide and eclectic range of topics but there’s a strong emphasis on the natural world. Grann’s collection is equally eclectic but has a much more obvious human interest angle – the “strange death of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic”; a story on arson investigation and whether shoddy science led to the execution of an innocent man in Texas; the story of Frederic Bourdin, a con artist who impersonated missing and exploited children; the story of a fireman who survived 9/11 but lost his memories of the event and was haunted that the only reason he survived was because he ran to save his skin while the rest of his team perished trying to save others; the story of Forrest Tucker, the robber who wouldn’t and couldn’t retire; the story of how Toto Constant, a Haitian war criminal, was allowed to immigrate to and walk free in the US; and the story of how the US Marshals tried to take down the Aryan Brotherhood, “the most dangerous prison gang in America”.
Most of the stories were compelling reads but my favourite was perhaps City of Water, a fascinating 2003 piece Grann wrote for The New Yorker on the vulnerability of New York City’s aging infrastructure and the group of men – the sandhoggers – tasked to build a new water Tunnel No. 3 to ensure that New York City’s taps don’t run dry even as the population grows and demand for industrial, commercial and residential use rises.
Eye opening.
McPhee writes on a wide and eclectic range of topics but there’s a strong emphasis on the natural world. Grann’s collection is equally eclectic but has a much more obvious human interest angle – the “strange death of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic”; a story on arson investigation and whether shoddy science led to the execution of an innocent man in Texas; the story of Frederic Bourdin, a con artist who impersonated missing and exploited children; the story of a fireman who survived 9/11 but lost his memories of the event and was haunted that the only reason he survived was because he ran to save his skin while the rest of his team perished trying to save others; the story of Forrest Tucker, the robber who wouldn’t and couldn’t retire; the story of how Toto Constant, a Haitian war criminal, was allowed to immigrate to and walk free in the US; and the story of how the US Marshals tried to take down the Aryan Brotherhood, “the most dangerous prison gang in America”.
Most of the stories were compelling reads but my favourite was perhaps City of Water, a fascinating 2003 piece Grann wrote for The New Yorker on the vulnerability of New York City’s aging infrastructure and the group of men – the sandhoggers – tasked to build a new water Tunnel No. 3 to ensure that New York City’s taps don’t run dry even as the population grows and demand for industrial, commercial and residential use rises.
Eye opening.