Erik Larson (historical author)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Jenkins and I'm joined by Monica Plattman.

Hi.

Hi. I'm still liking that your teacher called you Padman.

It was a really cool move.

Yeah. And at a young age, that's cool. Fifth grade, you said?

Eighth.

Oh.

I was really old.

You just look like you were in fifth grade.

No, I was very developed.

Very tall. Today's guest is one of my very favorite authors. I've talked about his books a million times on here. Eric Larson. He's a journalist and a bestselling author.

I need to read it.

I brought it up today in our interview with another guest.

Yeah.

The new book is called The Demon of Unrest, a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War.

I'll say it's timely.

Well, what's really fascinating about it, and unique, I think, is most books about the Civil War, they start with the first shot, basically. This is all about how on earth did we get to that point where we were a unified country and then we were divided?

Yeah.

Great book. And he was just a joy.

So fun. Really fun to talk to.

Yeah.

Great stories.

I think he had a good time, which was fun.

I hope so.

Yeah, we hope so. Please enjoy, Eric Larson.

He's an objects man.

Nice to meet you, Eric.

Hi, how are you?

I'm getting there.

Yeah, I heard you just got back from Portugal.

Not a direct flight. Have you been?

Not to Portugal yet, but just about everybody I know has been to Portugal. I hadn't been either.

Yeah, it's like the place to be.

Lisbon is so, so cute. It's crazy.

Huge? Cute. Yeah.

I haven't seen that word a lot in your writing.

Cute?

It's true.

Maybe in the next book.

Yeah, vile. You have a vernacular, and I just don't recall cute being used many times.

I'm thinking now, I don't think I use cute in any of my books.

Yeah, I would love AI to scan all your written work to see.

That's exciting. Vile was in Connections a couple of days ago. Do you play Connections?

No.

Oh, it's a really fun game.

Eric, we're about to change your life. Do you play any of the New York Times puzzles? Little games?

I did do Spelling Bee, and then got kind of burned out. And then I did Wordle a little bit, but it's just not my thing. My wife is a Wordle fanatic, and a Spelling Bee fanatic.

Connections is going to be for you. So, Spelling Bee, let's agree, it's exhaustive. It's laborious.

It's tedious.

Some days. it was tedious. You know, you get 276 words. It's like... Yes, yes.

Yeah.

I also find it's kind of hard to know when you're cheating at Spelling Bee as well. Because you kind of want to get a sense of, like, how many words are out there? Yep. Now, okay, are you aware of Connections? We'd love to explain it to you.

Vaguely aware of Connections. Okay. I've seen it.

The grid.

And then I've just ignored it. Okay, listen.

Sixteen words, you're going to put them in four different groups. They range from kind of easy to pretty darn hard.

You're already out. Oh, no!

No, no! Can I tell you, this is going to be perfect for your attention span. Because how long does it take you? I can do it on the toilet. It takes about ten minutes.

Well, sometimes, if it's too hard, and we don't want to run out of.

I'm not a word game guy. I'm too impatient.

Is that one of your main character defects?

Oh, I have many character defects.

Oh, I can't wait to learn about them.

That's the least of them.

I have many as well. Let's start in New York City. You're one of the rare guests where, when I look you up on Wikipedia, your parents are a complete enigma. I'd have no clue what they did. What did Mom and Dad do?

Okay, so, born in Brooklyn, moved to Long Island.

At what age?

Two. Actually, moved initially to Central Islip, Long Island, but moved from Central Islip because my mother was convinced that people would escape from the state asylum in Central Islip... I'd be scared of that. ...and come and kill us. Uh-huh.

Whoa. I believe it.

I believe it, too. But anyways, my father was a professor of speech and theater at Brooklyn College. My mother was a sometime substitute teacher, wrote an occasional mystery story. She had a good eye for crime and a great woman. My father was an only child.

Yes, yes, yes.

But in my house, growing up, the salient thing was if we wanted any book whatsoever, we could have it.

Sky was the limit on books.

Just go to mom and dad and say, you know, I'd like this book.

That's a good policy.

It worked out. Look what it produced.

Was all the moving your father taking different jobs?

He was always at Brooklyn College. Okay. It was just us moving until we found the right location, the right schools. And Freeport at the time was a great place to grow up.

Say the name of the town with the torpedo bomber.

Mespiqua.

Now, Alec Baldwin and Jerry Seinfeld, are they from there?

I don't know where they're from, but they may be Long Island people.

I mean, definitely Long Island. I think Mespiqua. Maybe. I feel like they've heard them bond over that.

Lou Reed was from Freeport.

Lou Reed was tough. Yeah. He was a tough gentleman. I tried to buy a song off of him for a movie once and it was really priced to not move.

Yeah. Really?

Yes, yes.

Well, good for him. He knows what he's worth. Well, did he?

Because no one ever put Walk on the Wild Side in a movie because no one could afford it. You get like the whole Beatles catalog for the price of Walk on the Wild Side.

Another stellar locale was Guy Lombardo's restaurant. It was in Freeport, on the water. Oh, baby. That was a real high point in Freeport life.

And you must have had siblings, because, you said with great disdain, only child. And I relate. My wife was an only child. And did your father have the unique gift of being able to host a party and then leave in the middle of it and go read a book in his room?

He didn't have that knack, but he had a lot of the characteristics of only children, kind of needy and adverse to compromise. We would periodically, I'm probably disclosing way too much, but as kids, we would occasionally think, God, we wish that our mother would divorce our father. Okay, sure, sure, sure. So all kinds of issues.

And you had siblings?

Two siblings. I have an older sister and a younger sister.

Okay.

Younger sister lives in Tiburon, here in California. Older sister lives in New York and has a house in Southampton, as do we around the corner.

Oh, okay, wonderful. And do you think being raised between two girls had an impact on you? Because I feel like boys who had lots of sisters were kind of good boys. A little better off. Yeah, a little better off.

I think it had a huge difference. First of all, I've always loved women. What I mean is, I'd much rather have a conversation with a woman than with a guy. I can connect in ways that I can't otherwise.

Yeah, you're allowed to have the full range of emotions around females. You are. And that's forbade around boys.

But that's not to say that I didn't occasionally beat the shit out of my sisters.

Well, sure, that's just natural.

Your testosterone, I mean, come on.

I like to think you got your ass kicked once or twice by the older sister, though.

I did.

Okay, good. As long as it was a two-way street. And what kind of student were you?

I was a really great student. Too good a student. I spent a lot of time studying. I wanted to do well in school. And I did very well.

Yeah, and what was driving that?

There was no pressure from the home front. I think it was mostly or completely self-imposed. Just an innate drive to do well. And luckily, I had the tools.

What do you mean, too well? Like, too much pressure on yourself?

No, too well, like, maybe there were other things that I could also have been doing besides studying.

A little more well-rounded. You could have been more social, maybe?

Well, I could have been more social. I always refer to myself to this day as a high-functioning introvert. I marvel at the fact that here I am. I write books. Each book takes about four years, very locked down.

Yeah, you research primarily.

But I'm on my own. And then, at the end of four years, you're expected by your publisher to go out and just blossom like a monarch butterfly. Be social.

Charismatic.

And charismatic and engaging. It's just not my nature.

You're right. This has plagued all fronts. for writers. There's a personality type. Let's get real.

So this is a very interesting thing. I would fail utterly in Hollywood because, as I understand, a lot of the pitching is oral. Yes, entirely. I'm a terrible oral pitcher. This is why I never tell people what my next project is.

Like when I was talking to you about connections. Yes. And just lose you entirely.

You noticed that, didn't you?

Yes. Yes, I'm observant.

The idea of pitching something oral is completely alien to me. So I would wither completely. But in what I do, where I choose to do a detailed book proposal for each book, it's my sweet spot.

I was listening to you talk with somebody about the way a book proposal works for nonfiction or specifically, some kind of research-oriented book. that, unlike a novel, where you would go in and pitch a publisher and perhaps you would have some outline or whatever you would have, the nonfiction world is much more, you described it as a venture capitalist. You hand them a document and it's completely fleshed out on a level that you would never do for a novel.

I do. Novels and nonfiction are two completely different worlds. With novels, unless you're really, really, really, really successful, you have to have the novel done before somebody's going to buy that work. Nonfiction, assuming you have some kind of track record, I do a detailed book proposal. My agent tells me now, he says, look, you don't have to do a detailed, just write a letter.

and now you have the added pressure of a deadline looming.

Deadline is not so much of a thing. For me, once I've got a book proposal, I've got a pretty good handle on what my timing is going to be, except with one project, and that was this project. Oh. Because of the pandemic.

How did it impact?

I conceived this book in March of 2020, just after my book tour for my previous book, Splendid and Vile, about Churchill. After that had been cut in half by the pandemic. And suddenly I was at our Southampton pandemic readout with nothing to do, more time on my hands than I had ever expected to have. So I started looking for the next project, but I couldn't do the thing that I usually do. And that is, when I think I have an idea, I jump into a physical archive with no pre-planning, just see what's there.

Interesting.

And yet, at the same time, I felt that this book had a very definite window into which it should be born, after which it would lose some of its energy. And that was this pre-November election period. For one thing, we didn't want to get caught up in the primaries. We didn't want to get caught up in the conventions and all the attention that they would get. But also to everything, there is a season.

Now, I'm assuming that, as your books have covered a myriad of different historical topics, the archives you then visit vary greatly? Or do you have favorite places you go? Do you have churches?

My church is the Library of Congress Madison Reading Room. It's the manuscript division of the Library of Congress in D.C.

So you'll travel. You're also out of your environment too, right? You kind of build a little bubble.

Which helps because you just shake everything up. I love going there. It is God's gift to researchers. It's so civilized. You don't even have to make an appointment, although it's not a bad idea to make sure that suddenly the place isn't packed and you're not gonna be able to go.

Forgive my ignorance, do you step up to a counter and say, hey, give me everything you got? I'm not.

Yeah, how does this work?

Well, more or less. You have basically a call slip. You give it to the guys at the desk and they evaluate, first of all, whether you're allowed to have it. The only standard. there is something so fragile.

Oh, I wanna go.

And there are all kinds of rules about how you're supposed to take things out of the file box and how you're supposed to put something in each file box to mark exactly where the file came from. And then you just get to go through this material. And what's so much better now than when I first started doing research on my books is that now you can photograph your documents with your iPhone. Ah-ha. You can photograph, Yeah.

Well, I was just thinking that you probably have the boring-est photo.

No, the most interesting.

No, no, no. Like. if he says to you like, oh yeah, let me show you this boat we got. And then you have to watch him scroll through, because we're always stuck in this situation where you're watching someone scroll through and it's just like reams and reams of writing.

I'll come back with a thousand photographs and then I got to process those photographs. I say it's a lot easier than it used to be with the photocopying, but then the benefit there was at least. you came back with what you needed, in the shape you needed it. Now, you come back with a thousand photographs, you got to process them on your computer and now also, because the image software is so good, you can't resist trying to touch them up and make them clearer, sharper. And so suddenly he's just lost in doing the whole photo thing.

Has it loosened up what would have normally been an editorial process? Because it was so inconvenient, do you think you end up coming home with more shit than you would have in the past? Yeah.

Yeah. So I would imagine.

it's like a gift and a curse, a little bit. Like why do you even take a picture of this as you're looking at it?

Actually, I talked to other writers about it as well. Yeah, because you can, you do.

Well, it's why people are photographing every mundane thing in the world. Back when you had to buy Fujifilm and pay to get a process, no one's going to fucking have a picture of their toast when you've got to go to the drugstore to get that process.

No, that is absolutely true. I took a picture of a hamburger yesterday. What? Only because I rarely eat a burger, but I was so hungry and I ordered this burger. It was more architecture than burger.

Wait, where was it? Was it here?

Yeah, it was at Shutter's, at the Lobby Restaurant.

They do burgers. Monica and I are a bit of burger files. We love burgers. We tell you anywhere in the country.

My kids are really partial to In-N-Out Burger.

Oh, beautiful place.

Because we don't have them on the East Coast.

Yeah, what a treat.

I'm not chilling for In-N-Out Burger.

For Big Burger. We are.

I have zero connection whatsoever to them, but I also find that people are very nice at the In-N-Out Burger. You feel like you're.

time traveling to the 50s, when it was still novel, and people were stoked to be in a new.

I mean, it's just a great operation.

It is, it is.

When AI takes over, it's going to taste worse, for sure.

Yeah, again, robots are so.

AI takes over In-N-Out Burger.

Yeah.

Apparently, there's a place in Pasadena that is run by robots.

There's no humans on site.

I'm skeptical of this. I want to go check it out, but that's the gimmick. And the robots bring out the food and apparently.

they're cooking it.

I'm nervous for teenagers frequenting that place. I know. I think they're underestimating what teenagers might do to the robots.

You're not going to find me at that place anytime soon.

Okay, are you ever at the manuscript room leafing through some documents, does it cross your mind like, hmm, I bet McCullough touched this?

No. It doesn't? No, I prefer to think that nobody else touched it but me, but of course I'm wrong. But there's overlap. What would he have done that I've worked on?

Well, he wrote 17.

1770s is way before me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to think what I read of his that might overlap. That's its own question. That's some foreshadowing. But I guess I have such a romantic imagination I'd be really excited about the history I'm touching. And then I would also think of my peers that have also been here doing this stuff.

I have to tell you, honestly, I have never once thought about my peers touching. what I've been touching. What I have thought about is the person who actually wrote this thing and what the context was. and wow, FDR wrote this. Or, in the case of Wilson, in my book about the Lusitania, his love letters to Edith Galt are virtually steamed with lust.

It's incredible how much we know about history through the correspondence between people. The demon of unrest. We're learning so much by what someone's saying to their brother.

Invaluable. And all public domain, which makes it even better. Boy, I like writing about the dead. Nobody's going to sue you.

That's true.

That is nice.

I was stunned, by the way, with Splendid and the Vile, to find that Churchill had copyrighted all his public speeches. They weren't actually public domain. when I worked on Splendid and the Vile. I had to get the rights from the company that controls them. They were quite civilized about it.

Yeah, what do you suppose? his motivation for that was?

He was an entrepreneur. He wanted to make money off that. He was perpetually short of cash. Wow.

You know what I got confused about? I was conflating Chernow because I was thinking of Grant. The only other book I've read in this phase of history is probably Grant.

I admire Ron Chernow, but I definitely don't think a lot about whether he touched this.

I think that's good.

Yeah, that's fair.

My style, the reason I don't use research assistants is because I want the material to just do me. I want to come to it absolutely fresh. When I'm in an archive, I often don't know what I'm looking for, but I know exactly when I find it. Even on a more elementary level, if I had a research assistant, I said, okay, I want you to find me everything you can about what so-and-so did on this particular day. It's kind of like plugging into a search engine and you're going to get exactly back what you asked for.

It's like going to the grocery store for bread and coming home with Doritos. You just don't know.

what you're going to find. It's exactly that way. Yeah, you're walking down the aisles. Even more to the point, I refer to this as the serendipity effect, which is that I love so-called open stack libraries, where you can wander and pull your books by yourself. It's common in university libraries, but uncommon in some other contexts, like the New York Public Library.

That is exciting. Sorry, another analogy. In the halcyon days of going to a video store, you'd go for one title. It was always out because you were going for a new release. and then all of a sudden you're renting some gang movie from the 80s and you love it.

That takes me back when I would go to the video store when we had just moved to Seattle. It was the Firehouse video on Capitol Hill. And we'd go there with the kids and we'd look for the videos to watch that night and always came back with things that we didn't necessarily set out to have, which was the fun of it.

That's the price we're paying for being able to order exactly what we want.

I think that is the price that we pay.

Yeah, less discovery.

I'll throw one in for the gals. Please. Trip to Target, you think you're going for toothpaste and then you will spend $700..

Yes, and have some rugs and some other stuff.

That's right. My wife is a great meanderer when it comes to shopping. When she and I are in a grocery store or a liquor store or whatever and walk through mission directed, I'm like, okay, I want this, this, this, and this. I look around, where's my wife? She's just drifting.

Well, we're nesters.

Gatherers.

It's genetic. Okay, so in 76, you graduate from Penn with a degree in Russian history.

Russian history, language, and culture. It was my own major.

Okay. What got you into that?

My freshman year Russian history course was taught by a guy who was incredible. This Alexander Ryazanovsky, who unfortunately has died. He was, in fact, an exiled Russian prince.

No way! Out of a Dostoyevsky book.

Yeah, I mean, he was a total expert on Russian history and he was a dynamic lecturer. I'd gone to college with the idea that I was going to be a lawyer until I tested that idea out by taking a business law course. Three days later, dropped the course because I could not read law books. I could not read histories of legal cases.

You would just zone out. I mean,

just shoot myself, more likely. Right, sure. But Professor Ryazanovsky was just this very warm and dynamic guy. He actually, at one point in sophomore year, a couple of us were in his classes. He came over to our dorm to teach us how to drink vodka the Russian way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it was a really interesting experience.

What's the Russian way? Just like a lot of it?

As much as you can, as fast as you can.

Yeah, first of all, you chill the vodka in a freezer and then you have it in a little glass, two fingers worth, and then you drink it down in one shot saying, Na zdorovie. Aha.

To your health. What could be more fun than drinking vodka with a professor? My dream.

You're that Russian history professor. Yes.

So we took a family vacation. I was probably 22.. My sister was probably 17.. We all went to Russia. We went into this huge wooden big public dining hall and it was all picnic tables and every two people was a fifth but completely unmarked vodka.

I was definitely drawn to Russian literature. I've read everything by Tolstoy. Unfortunately, I've read it all in English, except for a couple of small things that I was able to read in Russian. but Tolstoy's my guy. Okay.

I like Dostoyevsky.

I like Dostoyevsky too.

Okay. We're not shitting on him.

Not dissing anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I want to ask you, you just brought up the exact curiosity I have, which is why I like it. There is this kind of detached... I don't know what adjectives I want to use here without offending our Russian...

Listeners?

Listeners? I don't know.

Just imagine you're talking to Putin and just go for it. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah.

I'll let it rip on him. There's like a detached... a little sociopathy. There's something very bleak and interesting about it, and I love it. And I have left reading all those books wondering, is that just what happens when you translate Russian into English?

That is a very interesting question. One that I've often wondered about and on my bucket list is in fact to read War and Peace in the original Russian. Wow. Now, my bucket list is quite deep. I seriously doubt it's ever going to happen, but it would not take me that long to brush off my Russian.

was like. Yeah, I am curious what happens.

I feel the same way about. I'm a big fan of Scandinavian noir detective stories. Joe Nesbo, Henning Mankell and there's a pair of writers back in the 60s and 70s whose detective was Martin Beck. I don't know if you've read those. No, I haven't.

Yeah, it's hard to know.

I want to say I did ask a native Russian speaker who, oh, you know who's read them both? I might have even asked him, is the wonderful Bario.

Oh, no, George Saunders.

George Saunders. I think he has read them all in Russian and English. Really? Yes.

He's taught all of them.

Yeah, he teaches a Russian literature course.

Oh, I did not know that about George.

Yeah, that's his big kink, I guess. I don't know why.

I say that.

Okay.

He's a good guy. I met him once at Jeff Bezos, at this campfire thing. I had a nice conversation with him.

A beautiful human being, right?

Really nice guy. One more thing about Russian history, Russian language. One thing that really compelled me to dive super deep into Russian literature was another professor, a female professor of Russian literature, Marie Jean Lowe at Penn, mainly because I was in love with her.

Yeah, sure. That's a great motivator. That'll do it.

I was in love with my religion professor and, yeah, I was obsessed with religion for a semester.

For a semester. I got very religious for a semester. It totally got me so deep into Russian literature. Then I took a separate course, just strictly on Tolstoy, a seminar with her. The thing I realized about War and Peace is that what translation you pick is very important.

Is there one widely acknowledged as the best?

The one that is typically referred to as the maude translation.

Okay. I would just be comforted to know that there is some kind of unanimous...

Yeah, because that would drive me nuts.

Totally.

Am I reading the right translation? Right.

Yeah, I'm going to spend a year reading this book, by God, it better be the best version of it.

Well, you know, I read War and Peace in English. I think it was the same translation each time, but I've read it now three times, and what I find so fascinating about War and Peace is that each time you read it, it is like you have lived another life. And so the first time was when I was quite young. The second time was probably 10, 15 years later. Very different experience, because I was older.

That's encouraging. I should do that. I have done that with Catcher in the Rye, but my book is Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is excellent.

I'm certain I know what it's like to have murdered someone and walk around with that on my shoulder, just going mad from the weight of it. I know what it feels like.

I know what you mean. I know what you mean. But the thing about War and Peace, that feeling has not happened to me with any other book that I've read repeatedly. That book, the emotive qualities, the moments in the book, the oak tree, those are the things that keep morphing into other things.

It can map on somehow.

My other absolute, all-time favorite book is The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Oh, I've never read it. And I have read that, I don't know, 10 times. Oh, wow. But it doesn't change my life.

Archetypes.

Yeah, that's the genius. But also, the way he writes it, his narrative approach is so interesting. I don't even think I could emulate it. But talk about a remove. He never tells you what anybody's thinking, but you know everything that's going on.

I'm so intrigued to read it now.

Yeah, me too. Do a book club.

Read it before you see the film. Okay. But the film is absolutely brilliant, and by the reason it's brilliant, well, the casting is unbelievable, but also because the screenplay was essentially the book. No producer's notes on this one.

Yeah, yeah. It didn't get bastardized. Yeah. When you were studying Russian history, there's an element of it that's a little countercultural for you, because you're at the height of the Cold War and our fear of the Soviet Union. Did you feel like you were being a little punk rock by spending your time?

I had zero interest in Cold War, Russian history, Soviet era, anything post-revolutionary Russian. Absolutely zero appeal to me. So it was sort of a fool's errand to be studying Russian, because I knew in my heart of hearts that I was never going to visit Soviet Russia because I didn't want to.

You wanted to go to pre-1917 Russia.

Yeah. And then, when things began to warm up and change with Gorbachev and so forth, I started thinking this is the window. But of course my life was not at a point where I could take advantage of that. and now it's like forget it. Yeah.

I'm going to solve this for you. It's Italian, because you would love spending time there. They will enjoy you speaking your terrible version of Italian to them. They'll be charmed by it. When you go to France and muddle up there, they're not going to like it.

Well, I come from a family of Italophiles. We, for a time, were renting villas in Tuscany with friends. You know, we rented for a couple weeks. at a time. When I was doing my book, Thunderstruck, which is about Marconi and the second most famous murderer in English history, Pauly Harvey Crippen, I knew I'd have to do a lot of research in Italy.

I read this. And he's wandering around villages in France. No? No. I'm conflating that with another.

with some other.

Oh, that was the first.

But anyway, I knew I had to do a lot of Italian research in Italy. My eldest daughter, she, and I, studied Italian together. She has the gift, and by the time she was 16, she was essentially fluent.

Oh.

Still is to this day, but she spent a year here, a year there in Italy, worked with the State Department. So I brought her with me to try to open doors, and absolutely that was the case because they loved hearing her speak. I remember being at a restaurant in Deruta, a porcelain place, and the waiter looks at my daughter and says, you know, your Italian is very good. Then he looks over at me, puts his hand on my arm, and he says, yours is not so good.

This is very nice of him to point that out, yeah. How kind of him.

I have always loved traveling in Italy, and I know exactly what you mean. I've loved traveling in France as well, but you've got to have a sharper grasp of French to crack the wall than you have to have in Italy.

There's some benefit of the doubt and some goodwill towards us. I think that helps.

My wife and I spent six months in Paris, and that was an unforgettable experience.

What a city. So special. What a city. You may like this analogy for five seconds. My wife's on an international tour for some movie, and stop one is Hamburg, and we're in Hamburg, and the things I love about the Germans is like, everything runs so perfectly efficiently.

Yep, I know what you mean. Berlin is such an interesting place. I traveled there for In the Garden of Beasts. Yes. Here is Berlin, which can be way out there, right, I think it had a gay mayor before anybody else, and then, on the other hand, still the old control.

Yeah. You have Bauhaus, and then you also have.

It's odd.

Yeah. It's like the drug capital of Germany.

Then, you know, you step off a curb and traffic for 10 miles around stops. Yes. Yes. I'm half exaggerating. I went to a restaurant in Munich, back to the Marconi book.

Sure. He couldn't stand that napkin on the floor. No, he couldn't. There's no way he could have dealt with the rest of his meal.

He couldn't stand it. So, the rules were just crazy, whereas in Italy.

Oh, God.

No, you could be on fire.

Okay, so, this is another moment involving my eldest daughter. I have three daughters. I love them all equally. Don't get me wrong. But she did the School of Advanced International Studies and one year is spent in Bologna.

You were feeling that Roman Catholic. But I would think.

they would kind of like that.

Not in Bologna. This was a very prudish locale, but the change was incredible.

She let the pressure out of the room.

We were just treated so well.

I appreciate her doing that, because we're all caught in these situations where you're at a nice restaurant and you're like, God, I pray that guy is with his granddaughter right now. I just pray that that's what's happening.

I know what you mean.

Did you go to the Ducati plant while you were there? No. Okay, you missed out. It's pretty great.

Professional history and language.

Other than you would become a professor, I presume.

I could have gone into the State Department. I'm sure there would be professions, but I wasn't interested in any of them.

When do you get the bug to get a graduate degree in journalism?

A very direct chain of causality.

Another beautiful teacher? No.

Okay. Two beautiful male actors, actually. I was working for a publisher in New York, Grass and Dunlap. I was going to be promoted to assistant editor from Editorial System, which is next to Pond Scum. Yeah.

As good as it gets.

Taking down the president, the suspenseful film. I was like, man, that's what I'm going to do. I also said, yeah, I'm going to apply to one journalism school. The only one I want to go to, that's Columbia. If I get in, I'll go.

Oh.

What's the ferry at Calais?

The ferry at Calais. The Dover. Oh, oh, oh.

Romantic way to end.

It was not that romantic. I had no hotel. I was alone in this ferry terminal trying to sleep and I got kicked out every hour.

Oh, yikes.

Yes, my mother said to me when I was young and it proved to be very true that if you want to find out what kind of relationship you really have, go abroad somewhere with them. Being on an extended trip with another person will really shine the light on whether or not you're a match.

Absolutely endorse that. Always travel with the person you think you're going to spend your life with. Yes.

The sooner the better.

Yeah. This is not an analogy to that, but you know, the reason I went to the University of Pennsylvania was because my high school girlfriend was going and two weeks later we broke up. Okay, well.

It seems to be a theme.

Yeah.

Your wife is a doctor.

A neonatologist, intensive care for newborn babies.

And did you meet her at Columbia? No, no. Later down the road.

Later down the road. It was in San Francisco. I was working for the Wall Street Journal. And it was a blind date. Oh.

Oh, my gosh. Sick to witness.

Yeah. You were rewarded.

Well, you get worn down.

40 years. That's incredible. So you get your degree in journalism from Columbia and then you end up writing at the Bucks County Courier-Times in Levittown, PA, about murder, witches and environmental poisonings. Were there a lot of murders in Levittown?

There were a lot of murders in Bucks County, yeah. It's outside Philly. At least the bodies were dumped at Bucks County. It's not that there were that many murders, but I had a really fabulous job at the Bucks County Courier-Times. And it was a great place to work at that time.

Counterintuitive. When you think witch, you think the wart on the nose. Yeah, yeah.

There were no warts on her nose.

And no warts to be found.

None that I could see. That was just a chilling conversation.

Is it fair to say you bought in a bit? Did you leave there thinking she had some kind of weird connection?

I'm not shy about saying I agree with Shakespeare. There are more things on heaven and earth. William James, the famous Harvard psychologist, he was open to the potential for,

you know.

I was an anthropology major and I took a witchcraft course. Pretty fascinating.

That would have been good. Yeah.

I think I've met a couple witches. I think my facialist is a witch.

So my apartment in Manhattan, we'd been looking and looking and looking, and at one point, again, the same daughter came up.

These other daughters are so sad right now.

We're going to have to

throw them a couple bones.

here at some point.

My other daughters, they have had.

Listen, this trip to Lisbon, I was with my oldest daughter. We went and saw Taylor Swift. I get it. Oh, well, fine.

Taylor Swift in Lisbon with her eldest daughter. The others are not going to...

Yeah, this morning was a disaster. Oh, no.

But I'd been looking for two weeks for an apartment in Manhattan and I'd come up with things that I felt were ideal New York apartments, and they nixed one out of hand. I was like, what are you thinking? And they chose this place up on the Upper East Side, which I never thought I'd live in, up on Carnegie Hill. And we're in this apartment, which we had bought and did a significant renovation. I also had sworn that whatever place we buy, we're not going to renovate.

I know this well.

So we're in this place. It had been done sort of in an art deco style back in the 80s. We go into this back room, the third bedroom, and my eldest daughter taps me on the shoulder. She lifts this little canvas cover off and there's like a tool area with a drill press and so forth. And there is this witchy cudgel thing with crystals.

And you proceeded with the purchase. You weren't put off? I wouldn't want nothing to do with that place.

No, I'll tell you, I was not at all put off. It had a very good vibe. These were good witches.

There's some good witches out there.

I guess you're right.

I loved the book Rosemary's Baby and the film Rosemary's Baby. So I actually had told my real estate broker in New York, I said, look, I wouldn't mind a little witchy element in whatever house you look at.

Oh, wow!

Have they ever heard that before?

And here, by sheer luck, was this place that was owned by witches.

I wouldn't mind a little witchy vibe. Witchy element. Okay, Eric, I'll be sure to look for that.

I think the vibe in the apartment has been really great.

Have you ever stayed at the Maritime Hotel in Meatpacking? No. It has some crazy history. I had to stay there for a month or so doing a movie and it had been kind of a refuge for wayward girls. There's all this crazy lore about the place.

I'll have to go. Speaking of witches, you know, I just recently had to do a talk at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. I didn't even know that existed until I went there. A charming town with a weird, supernatural past. Went out for drinks and burgers afterwards to a bar and grill called the Second Salem.

Hogwarts?

No.

What was it named? No.

That's in Madison, Wisconsin.

You would know the name if I could remember it. So that was fascinating to me.

I want to go. I would love to see a werewolf. Let me ask you this. The job at the Bucks County Courier Times? was this something that the only slot that was open for you was this kind of macabre?

Yeah. That's where the stories are. Also, look, I'm Scandinavian. We're into dark.

Well, it's fucking dark there six months of the year. You got to embrace that.

My late architect friend Bill Zierman, we used to talk a lot about our love of these Scandinavian noir books. And he said, you know, I'll tell you one thing. The Scandinavians really know how to kill people.

Okay. So you go on to write for the Wall Street Journal, as you mentioned, and Time quite a bit. You've published your first book in 1992, your second in 94, your third in 99.. And then I now meet you in 2002, because I, like many other people, read The Devil in the White City and was, well, a lot of things, completely blown away with it. Couldn't stop reading it.

That was the first thing I did when I started doing the actual on-site research for that book was. I took the architecture tour on the boat.

So obviously you already know that that was a bit of a novel approach.

to a historical

serial killer story to involve all these things.

But did you know that on the eve of publication of that book, I was convinced my career was over? What?

Because why? What story had you told yourself?

Because it had two narratives traveling side by side that never actually touched except in one location. And I figured every critic in the country was going to cut me a new one, and I was happily wrong.

That's a legitimate fear, and I think we've certainly seen that approach go wrong. We see a movie trying to tell too many stories and none of it really coalesces. This one did in the most unique way. I got a lot of this from just reading The Demon of Unrest, your current book. It's one of my favorite things about reading.

I had read a thriller about old New York called The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Have you guys read that? Not read that, no. It left me feeling like I had a sense of what old New York was like, and I really liked just sinking into that past. So I started thinking wouldn't it be interesting to try to write a non-fiction book about a historical murder and try to evoke the same sense of past.

The Wrigley family.

Well, here's this footnote saying that gum was introduced to consumers at the fair. I love that gum and I was like, wow, this gum is a hundred years old? So I started looking more and more. First of all, I went through the rest of the footnotes in this awful monograph and came up with even more stuff and people and went to the fair, and then I realized yeah, that's the story. Within 24 hours of reading this, the story is a story of darkness and light, and the title Devil in the White City came to me right then.

No.

Wow. Now I can talk about Holmes, he's so bad, juxtaposed against this World's Fair, which was such an act of civic goodwill. Literally nicknamed the White City, for Christ's sake. Then the question is, okay, what am I going to do? Just write about the experience of a World's Fair that's so static.

Yes, right.

And these guys were building an entire city in a year and a half. All these amazing talents participating.

Yeah, and you realize how the story is getting to the World's Fair.

That was the story juxtaposed against the killer, and the killer turned out to be to me, much less interesting part of the story. Very static part of the story.

Kills people and he always kills people.

Although I did find the end where he was dragging those people around the countryside, pursued by that stalwart detective.

Yeah, that was a bit, Bonnie and Clyde-y. Thank you.

I love finding that. But started with the fair. I've since heard actually, and very satisfying to me from a lot of people, that they came to the book thinking, oh good, a serial killer story, but they fell for the World's Fair narrative.

It's incredible how many details of that book I still remember, having read it 20 years ago. but just the notion and I'll tell it to my children. We'll see a Ferris wheel and I'll go, you know, the Ferris wheel was a response to the Eiffel Tower, this spectacular thing that had been unveiled at the previous World's Fair. and we're at the Eiffel Tower. I bring it up.

Olmsted's my favorite character in the whole book. One of my favorite characters in my entire career writing. The man never had an unoriginal thought in his life. His handwriting sucks.

Really quick for people. he designed Central Park being probably the most prominent.

Cemetery in Oakland, California, various things, but he's really an original thinker and very kind, warm.

And watching him have to interact with people that were so much more nuts and bolts. geometry, architecture was interesting as well. There's a lot of archetypes with pretty predictable friction.

I like the fact that there was this tension, with Burnham trying to get his way at all times. The director of works at the fair and all these great minds either resisting or going for it. It's just very much the way corporations work today. It was nice to see that even back then there could be corporate assholes.

Yeah. Well also, you're bringing together like a bunch of people that are giants in their own right. They have been barking orders for a while now in their career and now they gotta come together and kind of collaborate.

And then there were also these sort of weirdly mystical moments when Root dies. You're 100 pages into the book and one of the key architects, literally of the fair dies. Yeah. And suddenly his close partner is alone to finish this project. All the stress.

of that deadline. I can't imagine. The whole world's gonna watch. You're carrying the weight of Chicago's pride on your shoulders.

Everything. Yeah. Absolutely. It's just amazing that he did it. So going into that book.

That whole chapter about all the submissions they were receiving, because they just opened it up to the nation, saying like we need something spectacular, skies and limits. send us your ideas.

Some of these were absolutely crackpot ideas.

And how long did it take to write that one?

About four years.

And you never felt like. this is so daunting.

Well, I was thinking the whole time you must read really quickly. I couldn't have read the boring book about the World's Fair and then looked at the footnotes and then read five more books. That would have been my four years.

I am a very slow reader, but when you're doing research I have the luxury. I don't have to teach anything, I don't have a second job. this is what I do. So it's like erosion. I mean I just read, read, read, read.

Yes. It's good branding.

But then also when I came across the final report on the fair, all the ailments that people had had, who were hauled off by this innovative ambulance service, including somebody who's identified as extreme flatulence.

Oh my. I don't know if you remember that.