Sunday, October 29, 2006

Them's the cords...

Alan Deutschman on Erik Larson's new book Thunderstruck at the San Francisco Chronicle. Telegraph helps catch murderer--at first I thought this was going to be a book about a particular favorite murderer of mine (one who featured prominently in my undergraduate senior thesis), John Tawell, the first criminal to achieve notoriety for being apprehended with the help of the electric telegraph--unfortunately not--but it still sounds very good, it's Crippen and Marconi in this case.

Clearly murderers end up virtually interchangeable in my memory, because I also want to say--but it might have been a completely different one, and I am not sure in any case about the source for this fact, sounds to me like family myth rather than historical fact though I suppose it's not inherently that unlikely--that my great-grandfather was on the jury that hanged Crippen, and that it was just before my grandfather was born. Hmmm...

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