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. In 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 cool.

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 best-selling author.

He wrote The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake in the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, and of course, The Devil in the White City. Tasty. He has a new book out now that I read and love, and I can't stop thinking about it. 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 is about it, and unique, I think, is most books about Civil War, they start with the first shot, basically. This is all about, like, 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. It was 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. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I feel like Spring always does this thing where you realize you've been thinking about something for a long time, and suddenly it feels like, okay, maybe I actually do something with it. Totally.

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Having separate bedrooms, a real kitchen, a common area where everyone can spread out. It just takes the pressure off. We were up in Toronto, and we opted for an Airbnb over a hotel. What I love about it is everyone can be on their own sleeping schedule.

That is nice. You're not required to wake up when the earliest riser gets up. Not for me. I always start by checking out guest favorites.

They're the most loved homes on the platform, consistently highly rated by guests. Some trips really do feel better when you have the right space. Hi there, how are you? I'm good, how are you?

Nice to meet you, Eric. Hi, how are you? I'm getting there. I heard you just got back to Portugal.

Not a direct flight. Have you been? Not to Portugal yet, but just about everybody I know. Have you been in Portugal?

I haven't been either. Yeah, it's like a place to be. Lisbon is so, so cute. It's crazy.

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

Cute. It's true. Maybe in the next book. Yeah, vile.

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

That's exciting. Vile was in Connections a couple days ago. Do you play Connections? No.

Oh, Eric, we're about to change your life. Do you play any of the New York Times puzzles? 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, like, yes, yes. Eight pan grams. 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. Okay, are you aware of Connections? We'd love to explain it to you. Vaguely aware of Connections.

Okay. I've seen it. I'm not a word game guy. I'm too impatient.

Is that when your main character defects is? Oh, I have many character defects. Oh, I can't wait to learn about it. 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 have no clue what they did.

What am I going to do? Okay, so Warren Brogan moved to Long Island. At what age? Two.

Actually, I 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 and come and kill us. Then we moved to Maspequa, and then we moved from there to Freeport, Long Island. But one of my lasting memories of Maspequa was, and I swear this is true, looking out my back window and seeing a guy who lived on a canal down the street at a World War II torpedo bomber in his backyard with the folded wings and the works. Really?

And either I had this really active imagination as a kid, or it was real. Whoa. I believe it. But anyways, my father was a professor of speech and theater at Brooklyn College.

My mother was a sometimes-sofative teacher, wrote an occasional mystery story. She had a good eye for crime and a great woman. My father was an only child, you know, having post-challenges. Yes, yes, yes.

But in my house growing up, the selling thing was, if we wanted any book whatsoever, we would have it. This guy was a limit on books. Just go to Mom and Dad and say, I'd like this book. That's a good policy.

It worked out. Look what it produced. Was all the movie and your father taking different jobs? He was always a book from college, and it was just us moving until we found the right location, right schools.

And Freeport at the time was a great place to grow up. Say the name of that town with the torpedo bomber in it. Masa Piqua. Now, Alec Baldwin and Jerry Seinfeld, are they from there?

I don't know where they're from, but it may be Long Island. I mean, definitely Long Island, I think Masa Piqua. Maybe, like, they've heard them bond over that. Lou Reed was from Freeport.

Lou Reed was tough. He was a tough gentleman. I tried to buy a song off of him for a movie once, and it was really price to not move. 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 siblings because you said you were great to stay an only child, and I relate. My wife was an only child.

Did your father have the unique gift of being able to host a party and then leave in the middle of and go read a book in his room? My 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. 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. 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.

Because I was around, I mean, come on. I like to think you got your ass kicked once or twice by the older sister, though. I did. 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 didn't make drive to do well. And luckily, I have the tools. What do you mean, too well?

Like too much pressure on yourself? No, too well. 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 a publisher to go out and just blossom like a monarch butterfly. Be social. Charismatic.

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. Writers are expected to be salesmen in Hollywood. They have to go in front of a studio.

And they have to be great salesmen or women. 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. Because if I talk about what my next project is, the thing I'm afraid of is that the person I'm talking to is just going to glaze over.

Like when I was talking to you about connection. Yes. You noticed that, didn't you? Yes.

It's unobservant. The idea of pitching something oral is completely alien to me. So I would wither completely. But in what I do, 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 go in and pitch a publisher and perhaps you have some outline or whatever you would have, the nonfiction world is much more you described it as venture capitalists. 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 contract.

I do a detailed book proposal. My agent tells me now. He says, look, you don't have to do it. Just write a letter.

But the reason I do the book proposal is to hold the PBGBs at bay. When I get the contract, the time comes to start the project. I have no doubt that this is a book. But if I just wrote a letter and said, you know, I think I want to write about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

There's no guarantee that there's actually a book there. Well, and now you have the added pressure of a deadline. You mean deadlines? That's 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 accepted with one project. And that was this project because of the pandemic. How did it impact? I could see this book in March of 2020, just after my book tour for my previous books, London and Vile about Churchill.

After that had been cut in half by the pandemic. And suddenly I was at our Southampton pandemic redoubt with nothing to do. More time on my hands than I 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, no pre-planning, just see what's there. And that's a very important step for me. And I could not do it in this case because archives were closed. And even if they were open, I would not have wanted to fly to them or take the train or anything like that.

So right away from the start, I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do to make the research proceed the way it should. So it left me behind the curve through much of the project. 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 was a season. And I was behind the curve.

So this became a really difficult book to do. Now, I'm assuming that as your books have covered a myriad of different historical topics, the archives you then visit very 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's 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 going to be able to go. But you've got to go through a certain amount of hoops to get in. You've got to get a reader's card.

But then once you're there, you adjust the things that are at your fingertips. Sometimes I just want a hell of it. I would order up the papers of somebody I wasn't even interested in. Forgive my ignorance.

Do you step up to a counter and say, hey, give me everything you've got on that? Yeah, how does it work? Well, more or less, you have basically a call. So if 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.

Like photographs, for example. You need to wear white gloves. And then the material comes out. They wheel it out on a cart.

Oh, I want to 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 it was 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, which is such a big benefit because you used to have to bring them up to the desk and ask, please, may I photocopy this?

And then they'd look it over and see if you could photocopy it without damaging it. And then you would photocopy it. It added another 30% of the time necessary to do your research. Now I just photograph these things.

Now, the flip side of that is my phone will have like a thousand photographs. Well, I was just thinking that you probably have the boringest 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. We watch him scroll through. And it's just like reams and reams.

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.

Now you come back with a thousand photographs. You got to process them on your computer. 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 you're just lost in doing both photocopying.

Is 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.

I would imagine it's like a gift and a curse a little bit. 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 buy Fujifilm, you 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. Only because I rarely eat a burger. But I was so hungry.

And I ordered this burger. It was more architecture than burger. And I just had to take a picture of my wife. I was a burger fanatic.

Wait, where was it? Was it here? Yeah, it was at Shutter's at the lobby restaurant. They do a good burger.

Monica and I are a bit of burgerphiles. We love burgers. You know, 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 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 the 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 the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even the poor person that's manually chopping the french fries out of the big potatoes. Have you seen them do that?

I mean, it's just a great operation. It is, it is. When AI takes over it, it's going to taste worse, for sure. Yeah, again, robots are so good.

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 the parents are cooking. I'm nervous for teenagers for quitting that place. I know. I think I understand what teenagers might do to the robots.

You're not going to find me at that place any time 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.

No, I prefer the thing because nobody else touched it but me. But there's overlap. What would he have done that I've worked on? I don't know.

Well, he wrote 17. No. I can send this his 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. What the context was.

Wow, FDR wrote this. Or in the case of Wilson, in my book about the Lusitania, his love letters that he was called it virtually steamed with lust. Was he naked when he wrote this? Yeah.

What's this like? It's incredible how much we know about history through the correspondence between young 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. Well, I like writing about the dead. I'm just going to sue you.

That is true. That is nice. I was stunned, by the way, with Swenna and the Vile to find that Churchill had copyrighted all his public speeches. They weren't actually a public domain when I worked on Swenna and the Vile.

I had to get the rights from the company that controls them. They were quite civilized about it. I think many of them have become now a public domain. Don't quote me on that.

But I was astonished. These are public speeches. There's this whole thing about the fight on the beaches and stuff. That's copyrighted by Churchill.

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.

Okay. You know what I got confused about? I was conflating churn. now because i was thinking of grant the only other book i've read in this phase of history is probably grant i admire ron channel but i definitely don't think a lot about whether he touches fair that's fair yeah that's fair my style the reason i don't use research assistance 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 what i find 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 if i'm going into that archive i'm looking at those things but then everything that comes out of that file i'm also curious about and i am willing to go down every single rabbit hole known to man if there's something gleaming at the end of that rabbit hole you never know what you're gonna find the thing you find on an envelope might be more interesting than the thing you find in the envelope well it's like going to the grocery store for bread and coming home with doritos like you just don't know you know it's exactly that way yeah you're walking down aisles even more to the point i refer to 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 context of the new york public library you have to go to the counter and put in your book requests and then they come out the problem there is you get exactly what you're looking for but if you're in an open stack library and you see your book on the shelf and suddenly within 10 books of that book there are things that are peripherally related and you never know what's going to pop out 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're 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 i would go to the video store when we had just moved to seattle it was a firehouse video on capitol hill we go there with 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 want yeah less discovery i'll throw one in for the gals just to target okay you think you're going for two days and then you will spend seven hundred dollars yes and have some rugs my wife is a great meanderer when it comes to shopping when she are in a grocery store or liquor store or whatever and walk through mission directed i'm okay i want this this and this and look around where's my wife she's just drifting well we're nesters nesters 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 pulled you into that my freshman year russian history course was taught by a guy who was incredible this is alexander riazanowski who unfortunately has died he was in fact an exile russian prince no way out of a dotsyovsky book yeah i mean he was a total expert on russian history and he was a dynamic lecturer i got into the college with the idea that i was going to be a lawyer until i tested that idea 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 just zone out i mean just shoot myself more likely but professor riazanowski 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 up to our dorm to teach us how to drink vodka the russian way which was a big mistake i've never been so hungover in my life but it was a really interesting experience what's the russian way just like a lot 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 uh-huh what's more fun than drinking vodka with a professor so we took a family vacation i was probably 22 my sister was probably 17 we all went to russia and 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 when we sat down we felt like they're anticipating us all drinking a lot of water we thought it was just 100 water bottles no water was available in my whole family including my mother we just got shit-faced by like 11 a.m where was it st petersburg probably 97 or something it must have been so funny it was wonderful we barely made a bag of the food show okay did you have favorite russian authors were you don't know russian literature i was definitely drawn to russian literature i've read everything by tulsa unfortunately i've read it all in english except for a couple small things i was able to read in russian but tulsa is my god okay i like dostoevsky i like dostoevsky too 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 russian listeners listeners i don't know just imagine you're talking to putin and just go for it 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 english because that could also be the mechanism 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 now my bucket list is quite deep i seriously thought it was ever going to happen it would not take me that long to brush off my russian if i have four intensive years of it and i got pretty good at it and then lost it all but i think i could get that brush back and then reading was much less challenging the conversation and just see what the reading experience yeah i'm curious what happens i feel the same way about i'm a big fan of scandinavian noir detective stories joe nesbo hey mangel and there's a pair of writers back in the 60s and 70s whose detective was martin beck kind of read those and the thing i love about these is the same kind of remoteness and i do wonder how much of that comes from the scandinavian gestalt or how much of that is from the translation effect 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 he's the wonderful barrio oh no dork sanders i think he has read them all in russian and english he teaches a russian literature course yeah that's his big kink i guess okay good guy i met him once at jeff bezos had his campfire thing they're a nice conversation a beautiful human being 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 russian literature region low and mainly because i was in love with her yeah sure i was in love with my religion professor yeah i was obsessed with religion for a semester it totally got me so deep into russian literature the thing i realized about war and peace is that what translation you pick is very important there are different translations and there are different advocates of each one but they are markedly different is there one widely acknowledged as the best the one that is typically referred to the mod translation okay i would just be comforted to know that there is some kind of unanimous i mean nuts totally and i read the right translation right i'm going to spend a year reading this book i got it for the best version of it 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 quite young second time was probably 10 15 years later very different experience because i was older yeah and then i really got another 10 some years after that and totally different experience that's encouraging i should do that i have done that but my book is crime and punishment i'm certain i know what it's like to have murdered someone and walk around with that on my shoulders going mad from the weight of it i know what it feels like i know what it feels like i think 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 multi-self and by dashel hammond i've never read it and i have read that i don't know 10 times but it doesn't change my life it doesn't make me think i've lived another life it just makes me respect more and more dashel hammond and how he did this because with the multi-self and dashel hammond created this diaspora of characters that we all take for granted as stereotypes like sam spade there was no sam spade before dashel hammond invented sam spade there was no casper gutman before hammond invented casper gutman all these characters 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 can emulate it but talk about it removed he never tells you what anybody's thinking but you know everything that's going on i'm so intrigued to read it 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'm sincere i had zero interest in cold war russian history soviet era anything post-revolutionary russian absolutely zero appeal to me so i started a fool's errand to be studying russian because i knew in my heart i was never going to visit soviet russia because i didn't want to you want to go to pre-1917 russia yeah and then when things began to warm up and change with goverture and so forth i started thinking this is the window because my life was not at a point where i could take advantage of that now i was like forget it yeah so i studied three languages each in considerable depth and i'm probably the absolute wrong person to study languages because i had zero retention but french italian and russian occasionally i think myself okay at this point in my life i would love to concentrate on one of those languages again which should i do and i think about russian because i just love the way russian sounds the flow i'm never gonna use it or do i do italian i love italian or should i do french and then i do nothing listen i'm gonna 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 when you go to france and model up they're not gonna like it so this is a very easy choice to make you're just gonna study italian well i come from family of italian we were time we're renting villas in tuscany with friends and for a couple weeks at a time when i was doing my book thunderstruck about marconi and second most famous murderer in english history paul harvey crippon i knew i have to do a lot of research in italy i read this and he's wandering around villages in france no no oh that was the first okay sorry sorry but anyway i knew i had to do a lot of time 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 still yes she spent a year here and 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 i 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 them to point that out yeah okay i've always loved traveling in italy and i know exactly what you mean i've loved traveling in france as well but you gotta 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 my wife i spent six months in paris and that was an unforgettable experience what a city what a city you may like this analogy for five seconds why was on an international tour for some movie and stop one is hamburg and we're in hamburg and the thing i love about germans is like everything runs so perfectly efficiently you can set your watch by anything that's happening and it's so clean everything's so orderly and we're there for four to five days and i'm just marveling at all this i don't realize that i'm slowly dying just a little bit my passion is i don't know that yet but our next stop is paris we land we're on the way to the hotel graffiti everywhere trash everywhere it's a dump but in seconds i'm hungry i'm horny i'm on fire and i go yeah these things are all trade-offs yeah i know it's such an interesting place i traveled there for in the garden of the beast yes here is berlin which can be way out there right i think i had a gay mayor before anybody else and then on the other hand still the old control yeah you have a house and then you also have yeah it's like the drug capital germany then you know you step off a curb and traffic for 10 miles around stops yeah i'm happy i went to a restaurant in munich back to the marconi but my eldest daughter was still with me and we were in a restaurant without really realizing my napkin had slid off my lap onto the floor this guy comes over from about three tables away older german gentleman picks up my napkin and presents it to me sure no i couldn't there's no way you could have dealt with the rest of his meal you couldn't stand it so the rules like chaos whereas in italy oh god no you could be on fire okay so this is another moment involving my eldest daughter i have two 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 i visited i went to this restaurant it was one of her favorites called the drugstore essentially it was a very good restaurant and she'd been there numerous times before but we sat down on the table and she is struck by how frosty the wait staff are and then it occurred to her she says to the waiter when he comes over to take our order my father would like this suddenly the lights are on it's like i'm not the old guy having an affair with a young woman i'm the father you're feeling that roman catholic 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 i appreciate her doing that because they're all caught in these situations where you're a nice restaurant you're like god i pray that guy's with his great daughter right now i just pray that that's what's what's happening the chef came down and sat with us instructing me on how to do a particular balsamic reduction for steak which is unbelievable like chocolate sauce only not chocolate so that was just a remarkable moment did you go to the ducati plant while you're there no okay you missed out it's pretty great stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare i guess there's really no careers for you to pursue with that degree per se other than you would become a professor i presume i would 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 crescent then i was going to be promoted assistant editor from editorial system which is next to pondscom yeah um and while i was there working for a president and i had all these friends we went to see all the presence men redford and hoffman just taking down the president the suspenseful film i was like man that's what i'm gonna do i also said i applied one journal the only one i want to go to that's colombia if i get in i'll go but i don't get in i'm going to europe with my girlfriend so i got it okay still went to europe with my girlfriend we broke up at the ferry at calais oh what's the ferry at calais the dover 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 yes 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 without being on an extended trip with another person will really shine a 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 for that the reason i went to the university of pennsylvania was because my high school girlfriend was going and two weeks later we broke up your wife is a doctor and did you meet her at colombia no later down the road it was in san francisco i was working for the wall street journal and it was a blind date we dated and broke up and got engaged and broke up got engaged again and broke up and the third engagement took and we've been married for close to 40 years now oh my god stick to itness yeah you're rewarded well you get worn down 40 years that's incredible so you get your degree in journalism from colombia 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 in 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 it was a large local newspaper lots of things going on i worked for the sunday newspaper which had like a circulation 125 000 which is really good but the best thing was that i wrote something called the sunday special a full page story with photos that would run once a week i would do one week and then college would do the next week but then on saturday nights i covered the cops and that was always very interesting always also very depressing because you know it's like clockwork some kid gets killed in a car wreck and i gotta talk to the parents but it was just so instructive in what life is like and would leave me off to do during the week stories about crime things that happened over the weekends and the thing about the witch that was part of a murder investigation the cops had consulted this witch the way cops sometimes talked to psychics boy when i went to that house had the creepiest feeling that this was no place i'd ever been before and she was gorgeous you know oh wow yeah counterintuitive when you think witch you think a word on the nose no words to be found not that i could say yeah this is just a chilling conversation is it fair to see 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 and more things on heaven and earth william james he famous harvard psychologist he was open to the potential for you know anything 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 my hand looking, looking, 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 draw them a couple of volunteer at some point. My other daughters, they have asked. Listen, this trip to Lisbon.

I was with my oldest daughter. We went and saw Taylor Swift. Oh, yeah. Taylor Swift, hit Lisbon.

The oldest daughter. The oldest daughter. The oldest daughter. Yeah, this morning was a disaster.

Oh, no. But I'd been looking for two weeks for an apartment in Manhattan. I come up with things that I thought were ideal New York apartments. And they nixed one out of hand.

It's like, what do you think? And they chose this place up on the Upper East Side, which I never thought I'd live in, Cardi Key Hill. And we're in this apartment. So we had bought.

And there's a significant renovation. I also had sworn that whatever place we buy, we're not going to renovate. Yeah, yeah. So I'm being overruled at every turn.

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, Tassi on the shoulder, she lifts this little canvas cover off. It's like a tool area with a drill press and so forth. And there is this witchy cudgel thing with crystals. And then she said, yeah, there's something else you should see.

And I'm like, okay, what's that? And she leads me over to this document on the wall, which was her official Wiccan certificate. The woman and her husband, they hadn't been making jewelry, as the ad said. They'd been making witch shit.

And you proceeded with the purchase. You weren't put off. I wouldn't want nothing to do with that. No, I was not at all put off.

It had a very good vibe. These were good witches. And 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 we live. Oh, no. Have you 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. 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? Nope. 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. A lot of witch experiences. 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.

Charing time with a weird supernatural past. Went out for drinks and burgers afterwards to a bar and grill called the Second Salem. You know, it's that kind of thing. It's the witch's tower where the witches used to meet.

Oh, my. And the legend is that there's a werewolf that prongs one of the streets in town. It's really interesting. It used to be the headquarters.

Somebody had a school for sort of the occult. Hogwarts? No. That's in Madison, Wisconsin.

You would know the name if I could remember. So that was fascinating. 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, or were you drawn to the macabre? It sounds like with all the witch talk that maybe you're kind of interested in the darkness. Yeah.

That's where the stories are. Also, I'm Scandinavian. We're into dark. Well, it's fucking dark there.

Six months of the year. You've got to embrace that. My late architect friend, Bill Zerman, we used to talk a lot about our love of these Scandinavian noir books. And he said, I'll tell you one thing.

These Scandinavians really know how to kill people. And he's right. Okay. So you've gone 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 1994, your third in 1999. 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.

It's such a page turner. What I thought was so unique and novel about it, which I'm sure you already know, is I just loved this weird synergy between all these different topics all kind of converging at once. I grew up in Detroit and we would visit Chicago a lot as a kid, yet I didn't know the history of it. So to learn the history of the skyscraper and learning to build in something without bedrock and what the World's Fair meant back then, me reading that book led to me on one of these boat architecture tour.

Oh, I think it was one of our live shows. I made time to do one of those tours on the boat. I would have never been interested in that without reading that book. 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 the publication of that book, I was convinced my career was over? 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've seen 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 reading, The Demon of Unrest, your current book.

It's one of my favorite things about reading historic books and why I'm drawn to them is it reminds you of how shitty it was to be alive in different times. It gives you like a level of gratitude. But just for starters, the killer, H.H. Holmes, he's just wandering around America and there's no photo ID.

He can introduce himself as any old person he wants. He can kill the people that live below him running the pharmacy and just write a letter to their relatives saying they're somewhere else and just assume ownership of a business. It was madness what could happen back then without any communication between counties and cities and no way to identify anyone. I guess I'm curious, how did the story come to you?

Did you first start with the serial killer or did you have an interest in the world fair or where did it start? I had read a thriller about old New York called The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Have you guys read that? I've 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 it wouldn't be interesting to try to write a non-fiction book about a historical murder and try to evoke the same sense of past. So I started doing some research. I went to my local library living in Seattle then and took out a book called Encyclopedia of Murder.

You know, wonderful. I started the day. I don't know where I came across a killer. H for Holmes or M for Mudgett's real name.

I wasn't interested. Here's a guy with an acid vest at the section table. I didn't want to do crime porn. I wanted to do something more like I don't know if you ever saw this from Gosford Park.

Yeah. So I kept looking. I was having zero luck. But I did remember that when I read about Holmes, I had read glancingly about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.

Now since anybody writes about the fair, I've written about Holmes in passing. Anybody wrote about Holmes wrote about the fair in passing, at least until I did my book. So I started thinking about the World's Fair of 1893. Sounded like it was a big deal.

Didn't know anything about it. Often that's a good path. It's just read and maybe something will come. So I went back to the library.

I got a bunch of books about the World's Fair of 1893. The first one I got should have killed that book right away. It was the most boring book. Clearly somebody's attempt at getting tenure.

But I know if I'm experienced to look at the footnotes. Always go to the footnotes. So I go to the footnotes and right away I'm intrigued. There's one footnote in particular.

Probably the book owes its origin entirely too. It was a footnote about Juicy Fruit Gum. Whoa. I love Juicy Fruit Gum.

The Wrigley family. Well here's this footnote saying that gum was introduced to consumers at the fair. I love that gum. I was like wow this gum is 100 years old.

So I started looking more and more. First of all I went to the rest of the footnotes in this awful monograph. And came up with even more stuff. And people 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 of Devil in the White City came to me right then.

Wow. Now I can talk about homelessness 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? I just read about the experience of the World's Fair that's so static. I got into the idea of how about building this thing. This is rather suspenseful.

I did it in a year and a half. And at the time when I started working on this book. In my house in Seattle we were renovating a basement. And that was taking six months.

That's right. And these guys were building an entire city in a year and a half. All these amazing talents participate. 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 Clydey. Thank you.

I love finding that. But it started with the fair. I've since heard it actually. And very satisfying to me from a lot of people.

That they came to the book thinking how 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. I'm going to know. The Ferris wheel was a response to the Eiffel Tower. The spectacular thing that had been unveiled at the previous World's Fair.

And we're at the Eiffel Tower I bring it up. Edison and electrification. And there's so much stuff from that period. We were launching into what would be a century of rapid inventions and developments just coming our way.

Even the Olmstead stuff. I didn't know anything about Olmstead. Olmstead is 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 me probably the most prominent.

Sanitary in Oakland, California. 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 worked today.

It was nice to see that even back then there could be corporate assholes. Yeah. We also bring together 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've got to come together and 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 going to watch. You're carrying the weight of Chicago's pride on your shoulders. Everything. Yeah.

Absolutely. It was just amazing. They did it. 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. Sky's the limit. Send us your ideas. And how long did it take to write that one?

Well, four years. And you never felt like this is so daunting. Well, I was thinking all the 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'm a very slow reader. But when you're doing research, I have to lecture.

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 just read, read, read, read. I don't have to like it. But if I find a single fat in the course of a day that just likes the imagination, it's very satisfying. Like one classic example in my research for the fair was the fact that there was this very innovative ambulance service.

And that particular day that I learned about this ambulance service, the only thing that I took away that day, this is from the Chicago Historical Society, was the fact that that innovative ambulance service was founded by a doctor named Gentles. G-E-N-T-L-E-S. Dr. Gentles founded this innovative ambulance service, which had rubber tires.

So it was a much more humane, gentle way of taking care of people. Oh, whoa. Dr. Gentles, 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 is identified as extreme flatulence. Oh, my. I don't know if you remember that.

That's really extreme. I'm kind of proud of myself that I didn't remember that. I remember a lot of this other stuff. When I came across that, I thought, oh, my God, this list.

I'm big on lists. If I find a list that is in and of itself very interesting, I will run the whole list and the book. Have you read Blitz by Chance? Drugs in the Third Reich.

And what they're working off of primarily is he had a physician that was with him all day long, Hitler. And he kept really meticulous records of what he gave him all day long. And it's insane. I think you would love this list.

Have met to read the book, but have not done so. Oh, he's shooting him up with like bovine hormones. I mean, the amount of injections he was receiving towards the end. He was a full-blown junkie.

He was a speedball addict. And you watch all of his decisions throughout those four years. They perfectly correlate with his rising addiction. It's really fascinating.

Oh, good. List galore. And then I wanted to just touch in on In the Garden of Beasts, Love, Terror, and American Family, and Hitler's Berlin. This, too, had the same.

You may get triggered by the word I use, but it's actually what I like most about your writing. These things that are on the surface are very pedestrian, but they become the thing I'm most interested in. And the notion that at that time, ambassadorships were given out to socialites and people that were rich, and that this professor from the University of Chicago would take this role of ambassador in Germany on the eve of the Nazi party, and that he would be expected to fund all of these parties out of his own bank account. This is something that never crossed my mind.

I get the term pedestrian, I would say even mundane, but it's those things that sometimes tie us to an era or a character in a way that is kind of charming. So this guy had the same issues that we have. The task is impossible. He's going to try to uphold diplomatic relationships, which ends up being the most tyrannical ruler of all time.

And additionally, he doesn't have any money to do that job. It's kind of comical. The reason Dodd and his daughter are in there is because I was looking for people through whom to experience the rise of Hitler as if I had been taken back to the past. So I wanted people who were naive, and both were naive in very particular ways, and Dodd was not going to be judgmental.

He resolved, and Martha Dodd was totally infatuated with the whole Nazi thing. Oh, she swaps in the glitz in the glam, sleeping with the head of the Gestapo? Nice suits, though, deal. Yeah, she was waiting for this.

Yeah, yeah. And the fact that they actually both underwent a character transformation, which in fiction and film and so forth is what you always need. And in this case, they didn't force it. We get it now.

This is a horror. This is not going to lessen. This is going to worsen. Right.

Thrilling book. What brought you to that book? I had no ideas, again, and I went to a very big bookstore to look at the non-fiction area to see what books might be coming out, what books were just out, what copies look good, what stories look good, everything informs the beast. And then I came across a book with a cover out that I always meant to read, never had, and that was A Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire.

Fuck, what a book. I had never read it. I got 50 pages into the book before I realized, wait a minute, William Shire was actually there in 1933-34 when all this stuff was starting to happen. Oh, yes, yes.

He went to cartel parties with all these people we now know to be monsters. You know, Joseph Rebels was high on the invitation list for parties because he had a good sense of humor. Sure. Cosby.

Yeah. It sucks when these monsters are charming, but that happens. Well, it's common, I think, actually. You're right.