BOOK OF THE DAY: The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, By David Grann Simon & Schuster 450pp, £12.99
THE SUBTITLE of this book, Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession, says more about the content than the title, as Conan Doyle's famous detective features in only one chapter.
Nine of the 12 stories first appeared in the New Yorker, all are true, and many verge on the surreal or end with a curious twist. The author does not just tell these bizarre tales, he meets, interviews, gets to know and seems to understand many of his strange subjects. And what a mixed bag it all is.
Violence and Nietzsche are recurring themes, and the first story is in many ways the strangest. There is a bitter rift among Sherlock Holmes devotees, and along the way we meet the fantasist Sherlockians who insist Holmes was a real person and will have nothing to do with the more down to earth Doyleans. Here a lonely eccentric who has dedicated his life to studying Holmes to become the world expert, garrottes himself (no easy task), but makes it seem like murder. He does this to frame the person he believes is selling an unknown collection of Conan Doyle’s papers. Now that’s commitment. Or just plain insanity.
One of the really tragic people in this book is Cameron Willingham from Texas, executed for a house fire in which his three children died. He always pleaded innocence, and some years later the forensic evidence that convicted him is discredited, but too late for Willingham.
Up there with the really weird is the tale of Frederic Bourdin, who spends his life pretending he’s a teenager. Strange but fairly harmless until he convinced a trailer park American family he was their long-lost son and went to live with them, with drastic consequences.
Then there is Forrest Tucker, who has done time in Alcatraz and San Quentin, but even at 78 cannot stop robbing banks. Or the Polish philosopher who wrote a violently obsessive book and was then convicted of the copycat murder of his ex-wife's boyfriend. Then there's the chilling account of Tito Constant, torturer, death squad leader and CIA stooge, who fled Haiti and settled in Queens among the families of his former victims. More down to Earth is the lengthy story of sandhogs, labourers who are digging an aqueduct tunnel 600ft below the streets of Manhattan. This one is so New Yorker.
How to describe a book like this? Achingly sad is “Which way did he run?”, the rather pitiless title of the chapter on New York fireman Kevin Shea, a survivor of the 9/11 attacks which killed his fire station colleagues. How did he survive? Shea has total amnesia until the point where he is found badly injured in Albany Street, some distance from the Twin Towers. He still has no idea how he got there.
The image of funerals so numerous that they force survivors to choose the friends they will commemorate is haunting. But Shea’s greatest demon is even more poignant and centres on survivor’s trauma: he is afraid he may have saved himself at the expense of others.
Grann has travelled far to conduct his detailed research interviews, and although skilfully crafted, you would need to have a fascination with the macabre and the grotesque to enjoy this book. Only a few characters in it are congenial, and if reading late at night you will put it down with a shiver, if not a quick metaphorical glance over your shoulder.
Fergus Mulligan is the author of The Trinity Year(Gill & Macmillan) and a contributor to the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press),
both published in 2009
