The London Times said, “There was something intensely thrilling, almost weird, in the thought of these two passengers traveling across the Atlantic in the belief that their identity and their whereabouts were unknown while both were being flashed with certainty to all quarters of the civilized world.”

There was a time when “Crippen the Poisoner” was as famous as Jack the Ripper, largely because he was the first murderer whose arrest could be followed in “real time” by the public, through wireless telegraph reports. His story, along with the story of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless, entwine to form the narrative of Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck. He performed a similar trick in his fascinating book, The Devil in the White City.

Hawley Harvey Crippen came from a respected Methodist family in Michigan. Though known as “Dr. Crippen,” he was in fact a homeopath. But he was respected by all who knew him – a tiny, balding, pop-eyed, bespectacled man, unfailingly polite and endlessly patient with everyone. Especially with his wife Cora, who was bubbly and social and domineering. She was, in descending stages, an aspiring opera singer, an aspiring Variety performer, and finally a popular hostess with the theatrical set, first in the US, then in London. She was an extravagant shopper and treated her husband as a house servant. Until…

Until he hired young Ethel Le Neve as a typist in his office, and fell in love with her. One day he announced to Cora’s friends that she’d left suddenly for America. And not long after, he told them she had died. This struck them as preposterous – gregarious Cora leaving without saying goodbye? Leaving all her clothes and jewelry behind? (Especially when they spotted Ethel wearing one of her necklaces.)

Some of them called the police, and Inspector Dew (who would become a celebrity because of this case) interviewed Crippen, who seemed plausible. But when a body was found buried in the basement, and Crippen and Ethel vanished, the hunt began.

A hunt that would have been impossible except for a brand-new invention, Wireless telegraphy, a new technology that wasn’t even perfected yet.

The other thread of this book is the story of the inventor of the Wireless, Guglielmo Marconi. Today we’d classify Marconi as someone on the autistic scale – obsessive in his interests, clueless in dealing with people. He wasn’t really a scientist – he was a tinkerer, an experimenter who followed his instincts rather than scientific principles. This annoyed real scientists, and together with his disregard for their feelings, made him a lot of enemies.

It’s an irony of this story that the murderer is nearly the most sympathetic character in it. I’m glad that author Larson chose to tell it in a dispassionate manner – it could have been maudlin.

If you like history and lots of interesting details, Thunderstruck is a fascinating book. I recommend it.