Hello. I'm Catherine Weller and this is The Open Book.

This week's selection is Thunderstruck by Erik Larson.

Erik Larson has a way of writing that pleases fiction and non-fiction readers alike. His book Isaac's Storm, about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, dazzled readers with Larson's ability to write about a past event with immediacy. I don't have to tell you about The Devil in the White City and the praise and it garnered. Book clubs, history readers and those who read strictly for pleasure all found it enjoyable.

In his latest offering, Thunderstruck, Larson utilizes the structure he successfully employed in The Devil in the White City: two narratives unfold, alternating with one another until their paths finally converge at the book's climax. The stories of Thunderstruck are Edwardian London's famous Crippen murder and the equally compelling tale of Gugliemo Marconi's struggle to send wireless transatlantic messages. For the most part, the formula again succeeds.

Hawley Harvey Crippen was by all accounts a sweet, unassuming man: a bespectacled meek homeopathic physician who fell in love with and married a big bold woman with operatic pretentions. Belle Elmore loved to live large, spend crippen's money on clothing and jewelry, and entertain men other than her husband. Larson paints a very sympathetic portrait of Crippen, right up to the point where he is discovered to have filletted Belle.

While the Crippens were traveling between the United States and England in search of fame and fortune for Belle, Marconi was also struggling with money and fame. He wasn't a trained physicist but he had an instinctive, and correct, theory about the potential of hertzian waves for long distance communication. He was simultaneously branded a thief of other men's ideas and patents, and a charlatan no better than the occultists of the time. In order to prove his theories, he burned through what would have been millions of dollars today. His pride and paranoia worked against him, though, as the demonstrations he repeatedly gave were too secretive to provide any real proof.

Marconi needed a big break and he got it when Crippen killed his wife and fled for the U.S. the transatlantic pursuit of Crippen and his lover was a media sensation, fueld by Marconi's wireless. Prior to this point in the book, Larson's trademark digressions were a bit tedious, the Marconi passages a bit labored, and the clifhanger sentances completing each section grew tiresome. But the chase to capture Crippen is Erik Larson at his mesmerizing, synthesizing best. And it makes reading Thunderstruck worth your while.

You've been listening to The Open Book on KCPW. I'm Catherine Weller.

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