 Kindle cover | |
| Author | David Grann |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 2010 |
Published in English | March 9, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 350 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0-385-51792-8 |
| LC Class | PN4874.G672A25 2010 |
| Preceded by | The Lost City of Z |
| Followed by | Killers of the Flower Moon |
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010) is a collection of 12 articles (essays) by American journalist David Grann.
The essays were previously published between 2000 and 2009 in The New Yorker , The New York Times Magazine , The New Republic and The Atlantic , and have been "updated and revised". [1] The stories are about real-life mysteries, a "mosaic of ambition, deception, passion, and folly." [2]
Four of the stories have been filmed or optioned, and five of the stories have been collected in other "best" anthology volumes. [3] It is Grann's second book, after The Lost City of Z (2009) published the previous year, and his first collected anthology of essays.
In The New York Times , Sam Roberts called the book "riveting." [4] Writing in Entertainment Weekly , critic Keith Staskiewicz gave the collection a grade of A: "This collection of David Grann's nonfiction, much of it from The New Yorker, is by turns horrifying, hilarious, and outlandish... These straightforward tales grip you as unrelentingly as the suckered appendages of the giant squid Grann attempts to track down in 'The Squid Hunter.' You might feel that some of the pieces skirt credibility, but remember, as Holmes himself once said, Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.'" [5]
| Chapter Number | Part | Chapter Title | Year Published | Source(s) | Related articles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Part 1 [6] | Mysterious Circumstances | 2004 | The New Yorker, December 13, 2004. [7] The Best American Crime Writing 2005 | Richard Lancelyn Green, Category:Sherlock Holmes |
| 02 | Part 1 | Trial by Fire | 2009 | The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. [8] | Cameron Todd Willingham |
| 03 | Part 1 | The Chameleon | 2008 | The New Yorker, August 11, 2008. [9] | Frédéric Bourdin |
| 04 | Part 1 | True Crime | 2008 | The New Yorker, February 11, 2008. [10] The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 | Krystian Bala |
| 05 | Part 1 | Which Way Did He Run? | 2002 | The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2002. [11] | September 11 attacks |
| 06 | Part 2 [12] | The Squid Hunter | 2004 | The New Yorker, May 24, 2004. [13] | Giant squid, Steve O'Shea |
| 07 | Part 2 | City of Water | 2003 | The New Yorker, September 1, 2003. [14] | Sandhog, Water infrastructure of New York City |
| 08 | Part 2 | The Old Man and the Gun | 2003 | The New Yorker, January 27, 2003. [15] The Best American Crime Writing 2004 | Forrest Tucker |
| 09 | Part 2 | Stealing Time | 2005 | The New Yorker, September 12, 2005. [16] The Best American Sports Writing 2006 | Rickey Henderson |
| 10 | Part 3 [17] | The Brand | 2004 | The New Yorker, February 16, 2004. [18] | Aryan Brotherhood |
| 11 | Part 3 | Crimetown, U.S.A. | 2000 | The New Republic, July 10, 2000. [19] Wise Guys: Stories of Mobsters from Jersey to Vegas [20] | James Traficant |
| 12 | Part 3 | Giving the 'Devil' His Due | 2001 | The Atlantic, June, 2001. [21] | Toto Constant |
Based on article "True Crime: A postmodern murder mystery":
Based on article "The Old Man and the Gun: Forrest Tucker had a long career robbing banks, and he wasn't willing to retire":
Based on article "Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man?"
Based on article "City of Water: Can an intricate and antiquated maze of tunnels continue to sustain New York?":
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.
Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He is a Professor Emeritus at Queens College, City University of New York where he taught classes in American literature and myth criticism for forty-two years. Schechter's essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune. He is the editor of the Library of America volume, True Crime: An American Anthology. His newest book, published in September 2023, is Murderabilia: A History of Crime in 100 Objects.
Cameron Todd Willingham was a possibly innocent American man who was convicted and executed for the murder of his three young children by arson at the family home in Corsicana, Texas, on December 23, 1991. Since Willingham's 2004 execution, significant controversy has arisen over the legitimacy of the guilty verdict and the interpretation of the evidence that was used to convict him of arson and murder.
Richard Gordon Lancelyn Green was a British scholar of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, and was generally considered the world's foremost scholar of these topics.
Charles Gray was an English actor and voice artist. Appearing in around 140 films and TV series, he was best known as the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever; Dikko Henderson in a previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice; Sherlock Holmes's brother Mycroft Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; and The Criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a series of radio dramas based on Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes. Written by Bert Coules as a pastiche of Doyle's work, the series was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2002, 2004, 2008–2009 and 2010. There are sixteen episodes, all of them produced and directed by Patrick Rayner of BBC Scotland. Clive Merrison stars as Holmes, having portrayed the detective in a 1989–1998 BBC radio series of dramatisations of every Sherlock Holmes story by Doyle. Andrew Sachs appears as Dr. Watson, replacing Michael Williams after Williams died following the Radio 4 run of Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Each of the stories is based on a throwaway reference from an actual Doyle short story or novel. The first two series are repeated regularly on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is a 2003 historical non-fiction book by Erik Larson presented in a novelistic style. Set in Chicago during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it tells the story of World’s Fair architect Daniel Burnham and of H. H. Holmes, a criminal figure widely considered the first serial killer in the United States.
David Stuart Davies is a British writer. He worked as a teacher of English before becoming a full-time editor, writer, and playwright. Davies has written extensively about Sherlock Holmes, both fiction and non-fiction. He is the editor of Red Herrings, the monthly in-house publication of the Crime Writers' Association.
The Lost City of Z is the name given by Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British surveyor of the early 20th Century, to an indigenous city that he believed had existed in the jungle of the Mato Grosso state of Brazil. Based on early histories of South America and his own explorations of the Amazon River region, Fawcett theorized that a complex civilization once existed there, and that isolated ruins may have survived.
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier is a 1997 book by Suelette Dreyfus, researched by Julian Assange. It describes the exploits of a group of Australian, American, and British black hat hackers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, among them Assange himself.
Krystian Bala is a Polish murderer, self-published writer, and photographer.
David Elliot Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a non-fiction book by American author David Grann. Published in 2009, the book recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z". In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.
Forrest Silva "Woody" Tucker was an American career criminal first imprisoned at age 15 who spent the rest of his life in and out of jail. He is best known as an escape artist, having escaped from prison "18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully", by his own reckoning. The 2018 film The Old Man & the Gun, starring Robert Redford as Tucker, is based on his life.
Daniel Stashower is an American author and editor of mystery fiction and historical nonfiction. He lives in Maryland.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is a 2017 nonfiction book by American journalist David Grann about the Osage murders. Time magazine listed Killers of the Flower Moon as one of its top ten nonfiction books of 2017.
Trial by Fire is a 2018 American biographical drama film directed by Edward Zwick. The story is based upon David Grann's article "Trial by Fire" that appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. The film stars Jack O'Connell, Laura Dern, Emily Meade, Jeff Perry and Jade Pettyjohn.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is the fifth nonfiction book by American journalist David Grann. The book focuses on the Wager Mutiny. It was published on April 18, 2023 by Doubleday. The book became a bestseller, topping The New York Times best-seller list in the nonfiction category for its first week of publication. Twenty-four weeks later, it was still at #10 on their list of best selling hardcover non-fiction books.