Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 June 17 • Friday

Most of the pieces in this collection of journalism appeared originally in The New Yorker. The title refers to the first and last stories in the book: "Mysterious Circumstances", about what appears to be a real-life locked-room murder mystery, with a Sherlock Holmes expert as the victim, opens the collection, and "Giving 'The Devil' His Due", about a former Haitian death-squad leader now living as a real-estate salesman in Queens, ends the book.

The Devil & Sherlock Holmes is divided into three parts, each tagged with a quote from a Sherlock Holmes story. It was this emphasis on Holmes that prompted me to buy the book in the first place. The first story had me a little disappointed, perhaps because I have encountered Sherlock Holmes fanatics in real life, while working at The Mysterious Bookshop. "Mysterious Circumstances" also struck me as somewhat anticlimactic, but as I read further in the book, I changed my mind about this, admiring Grann for his restraint in writing about obsessive people and dangerous outsiders. He sticks to the facts without embellishing or sensationalizing and makes judicious use of his own presence in the stories.

"Trial by Fire" relates how an innocent man appears to have been executed in Texas. "The Chameleon" is about a grown man who impersonates teenagers with startlingly successful results, at one point finding himself in a situation that suggests Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar. "Which Way Did He Run?" is about a fireman who survives 9/11 but has no memory of how he survived.

"The Squid Hunter" follows people obsessed with capturing a giant squid. One of the most interesting pieces is "City of Water", about the underground tunnels that supply New York City with its water, and about the enormous new tunnel being built right now, an astonishing feat of engineering. "The Old Man and the Gun" is a portrait of that great American icon, the bank robber, and its subject is still at it at the age of 78. This one has an exhilarating beginning but a sad ending. "Stealing Time" is similar, but replaces bank robber with baseball player.

"The Brand" is the most terrifying story in the collection, detailing the rise to power of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang that rivals the Mafia in its use of violence and organization of crime. When John Gotti was in jail, he needed them more than they needed him. "Crimetown, U.S.A." is a real-life Red Harvest, about an Ohio county that’s practically owned by the mob. "True Crime" is subtitled “A Postmodern Murder Mystery” and takes place in Poland, where a police investigator solves a cold case by reading a novel. Finally there’s "Giving 'The Devil' His Due", which presents the bizarre circumstance of a hated figure banished to live among those who hate him. It will not make you feel good about the CIA or the US State Department.

All in all, this is a very impressive collection of recent journalism, a tribute to the values of understatement and the calm, careful presentation of facts. I stopped reading The New Yorker a few years ago. Perhaps I should start again.