The Devil and Sherlock Holmes by David Grann

Move over Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer, you’ve got competition.  David Grann is my new favorite adventure story writer.  In the first book I read by Grann, he traced the steps of the bold explorer Percy Fawcett who set off in the Amazon looking for the lost city of gold.  The Lost City of Z was a deceptively simple story that grew to include not only a re-thinking of the anthropology of the dense Amazonian jungle but a survey of this history of exploration and cartography – when Fawcett and explorer of the old school met the new technology-enhanced expeditions.  I’ve recommended it to everybody.

Now comes The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which is a compendium of Grann’s stories from his work as a journalist, mostly from the early 2000s.  In it you meet famed Holmes/Doyle scholar Richard Lancelyn Green and what he may or may not have done for love of the brilliant detective and Frédéric Bourdin, often called the human chameleon for his ability to transform himself into teenagers.

Grann has made unique choices in the people he chronicles for these stories and he draws the reader in to their complicated lives.  Green, for instance, lived and breathed Doyle and Holmes and through Grann’s storytelling I could almost enter into the mania.  Its an esoteric world with adherents of Holmes who disregard Doyle and even question his authorship.  It might not venture into Crips and Bloods territory but the warfare is intellectually fierce.

In a more conventional story of gangland, Grann details the rise and partial fall of the Aryan Brotherhood. For those who might not know it, the AB is a prison gang who killed, stole and intimidated even those charged with guarding them. They began as a white supremacist group, bands of white prisoners united against those of other colors.  They weren’t satisfied with this and soon controlled drugs and prostitution and power just like their “free” world counterparts did.

These stories were by turn entrancing, enlightening, mysterious and sad.  Read the story of  Trial by Fire, the story of Todd Willingham who was put to death by the state of Texas for the murder by fire of his children.  Only did he do it?  Was he indeed guilty?

Grann doesn’t always draw conclusions but he does leave the reader with something to think about.  Order this through Lake-Mendocino-Sonoma libraries here.

~mel