Unforgettable and sinister

The devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession
By David Grann, Doubleday, Rs 660

The Victorian age refuses to loosen its grip on the imagination of writers even in the 21st century. The seething mixture of unexpected facts, strange realities, new forms of knowledge, breached geographical boundaries, Darwin and Lyell and Freud, combined with the unsettling — and intellectually emancipating — possibility that the earth, and life on earth, have existed for far longer than ever imagined generated adventurous new thinking and writing that still cast their long shadow on stories today.

Out of that late 19th-century brew of fact and fiction was born the belief in lost civilizations, cities and races waiting to be discovered. The ‘lost world’ tradition of fantasy adventure touched with reality reverses its direction and becomes reality touched with fantasy, the known infused with the unknowable, in the work of David Grann, a journalist who chases real-life mysteries. During his research on the enigmatic death of Richard Lancelyn Green, an obsessive pursuer of Arthur Conan Doyle’s allegedly missing papers, Grann discovered Conan Doyle’s friend, Percy Fawcett, the colonel who vanished during his search for the lost city of Z in Brazil. Fawcett provided Conan Doyle with the model for Professor Challenger in The Lost World, and Grann with the real-life hero of his prize-winning book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

But Green’s story became the first, and one of the most gripping, of Grann’s tales in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Divided into three sections, this book contains 12 ‘stories’, none of them fictional. All were published earlier, chiefly in The New Yorker. Although few of them allude to the late Victorian world as does “Mysterious circumstances”, Green’s tale of obsession and death, Grann’s ‘long-form narrative journalism’ is imbued with a very 19th-century preference for strange characters, self-destructive passions, irresistible ironies and insoluble mysteries. But it is through the best traditions of modern research that Grann establishes that truth is stranger than fiction, a sentiment the Victorians would have heartily endorsed.

More, Grann is an excellent storyteller. He looks for mysteries and obsessions, as well as for ‘characters’. But he designs his ‘plots’ carefully too, deciding at which points in the narrative he should release chosen parts of the information. He seems to have all the ingredients of the Victorian novel at his command. “The chameleon”, the story of Frédéric Bourdin, a French conman who habitually disguised himself as a lost teenager till he ended up in an American home as its long-lost son, is one of the best examples of Grann’s control over his material. It takes a while for the conman to realize that he has been taken for the ride of his life by the quiescent family, which seems to have an excellent idea about what actually happened to their lost boy.

If there is a touch of humour in Bourdin’s fate, there is nothing but tragedy in “Trial by fire”, the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Texan accused of burning down his house with his three baby daughters in it. A combination of bad forensics, an arrogant investigator and peculiar laws condemn him to death, although later inquiries suggest he was probably innocent as he always claimed. The same non-judgmental compassion and aversion to drama marks “True crime”, the sinister account of the perverse and brilliant Krystian Bala, a Polish cult novelist convicted for the horrible murder of a businessman supposed to have been recorded in fictional form in his post-modern novel, Amok. He is writing another one as Grann’s account closes.

The stories in the first section are among his best, and the closest to the book’s declared theme. Less crime, more obsession, forms the content of the second section, in which “The old man and the gun” tells the tale of Forrest Tucker, an aged robber with a long history of imprisonment, who destroys his happy conjugal life in the hope of the last, perfect bank hold-up. “City of water” is the most remarkable, for all Grann does here is grip the reader with an account of generations of “sandhog” workers who spend most of their waking hours among the waterways, aqueducts and pipes underground in New York, ensuring that the city is never short of its daily requirement of 1.3 billion gallons of water. Steve O’Shea’s obsession with catching the giant squid is innocent too, but dangerous and frustrating, since he fails in his desperate quest while the author is with him, tossed about on a small boat among the waves and rocks.

The last section is mainly about organized crime, although there is no dearth of unforgettable, if frightening, characters. Among these is the the Haitian paramilitary killer, Toto Constant, apparently protected by the American government for mysterious reasons. Grann’s unearthing of the story in “Giving the ‘Devil’ his due”, by first letting Toto speak for himself and then following the complicated trail he reveals, demonstrates a journalist’s finest skills. His investigation is tireless, his reporting without comment.

It is Grann’s dedication to “history and texture” that allows him to capture the worlds of his characters in depth and tone as precisely as he does facts and sequences. Grann’s approach reaches beyond journalism. It is similar to Kate Summerscale’s exhaustively researched novel-like account of the 1860 Road Hill murder, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Summerscale had brought to life a turning-point in the history of both detection and crime fiction. Grann, too, seizes characters and moments at their crux, yet leaves the questions of good and evil, truth and ambiguity, to the reader. The Victorian shadows have found new substance.