City Of Bombs

My first true NYC book—now out in paperback—wins an Edgar Award.

Last Thursday night I put on a suit for the first time in years and headed up to Times Square with my wife to attend the Edgar Awards ceremony, where my book The Infernal Machine was up for an award in the Fact Crime category. Neither of us are the biggest fans of Times Square; my wife commuted there for most of the 90s during a spell working as a producer at MTV, and it’s only gotten more extreme as a sensory experience since then, particularly in the early evening when the sidewalks are crammed with the throngs converging onto the theater district. The Edgars were being awarded by the Mystery Writers Of America—the award itself is named after Edgar Allen Poe—in the 6th floor ballroom of the Marriott Marquis, the postmodern grand-dame of Times Square with its glass elevators and rotating rooftop bar. I don’t think I’d set foot in it for about thirty years, when I last had a few campy drinks there with friends shortly after moving to New York.

I was savoring all of it as we walked up out of the subway, despite the crowds and the chaos. I’ve had a couple of lucky moments over the years where I’ve come to midtown to cross some interesting milestone in my career—I remember feeling a similar shiver taking a cab up to do The Daily Show for the first time, for my book Everything Bad Is Good For You. I spent more hours than I should probably admit as a sixteen-year-old in suburban DC daydreaming about making it as a writer in New York City. So I always try to stop for a second when I find myself in a moment like last Thursday night and quietly think to myself: sixteen-year-old Steven would have approved.

It was all very self-congratulatory, for sure, but genuinely tempered by the conviction that I had formed over the preceding 24 hours that I was almost certainly not going to win. The competition was too impressive, and I worried that Infernal didn’t quite fit the genre conventions of the true crime category. (My main concern, ironically, was that there were too many crimes in the book.) Before my wife and I left our apartment, I’d briefly discussed my odds with our oldest son Clay, who had been my research assistant on the book. I told him that I had downgraded my expectations, and he seemed surprisingly relieved. “I looked at those other books in the category,” he volunteered helpfully, “and I was kinda wondering why you thought you had a chance.”

But then somehow, against all the odds set by the Johnson family bookies, when they actually opened the envelope, the first three words spoken were: the infernal machine.

It’s been almost exactly a year since Infernal Machine came out—the paperback edition just launched last week as it happens—and there are many new faces here at Adjacent Possible since I last posted about the book. So allow me a quick précis of the book for the newcomers who haven’t had a chance to read it. The Infernal Machine is the fourth one of mine that tells a (mostly) linear historical narrative, though in this case it’s really three interwoven narratives, spanning about half a century. One thread is Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, one of the great case studies in the unintended consequences of technological and scientific innovation. Another is the rise of anarchism as a major revolutionary movement, in Europe and the United States, and that movement’s embrace of terrorism and political violence as a semi-normalized strategy for advancing its cause, much of it enabled by the portable and potent weapon of Nobel’s dynamite. And finally, the book chronicles the rise of modern policing and surveillance systems—the whole notion of crimefighting as an information science that culminates in Hoover’s FBI—which was in many ways set in motion by the wave of terror unleashed by the anarchists.

Infernal touches on a number of themes that I have long been interested in, themes that make regular appearances in other books of mine: unanticipated secondary effects of new technologies (like the story about air conditioning leading to Ronald Reagan’s election in How We Got To Now); the oft-overlooked impact of data management tools in shaping society (William Farr and John Snow inventing epidemiology in The Ghost Map and Extra Life); the way rogue groups working outside the law end up shaping much more formidable institutions (as in the interaction between the pirates and the East India Company in Enemy of All Mankind.) But last week after the Edgars, as I took the subway home with my wife, clutching my porcelain replica of Edgar Allen Poe, I was thinking about a property of Infernal Machine that made it different from my other books: despite the fact that I have lived in Brooklyn or Manhattan for the vast majority of my adult life, Infernal is the first book I’ve written that is truly set in New York City. I’d actually written significantly more about London than I had about my own home town, and never written anything where New York itself was a central character in the story.

There are so many different slices of New York in Infernal that over the weekend I sat down at my desk and opened up a NotebookLM notebook I have with the full manuscript and asked for an overview of all the locations that play an important role in the book, with quick summaries of the plot events and characters associated with each. (Notebook as you might imagine is incredibly good at re-organizing the events of a book along a different axis like this.) Skimming the list was a great reminder of just how fractal a metropolis like New York can be, as you move from the greater metropolitan area to the boroughs down to the neighborhoods and then the micro-communities that can sometimes shift over the course of a few blocks. There’s the hub around the police headquarters—initially in eastern Soho, then further downtown at Centre street—that I remember first being captivated by reading Caleb Carr’s The Alienist in my twenties. That’s where the book’s nerd-detective hero Joseph Faurot sets up his “Identification Bureau” using the suspiciously European techniques of fingerprinting and other forensic sciences to solve crimes for the first time. Adjacent to that nexus of law enforcement was, of course, the Lower East Side, the primary gateway and settlement area for successive waves of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It had been initially dubbed "Kleindeutschland" (Little Germany), but by the time Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman—the central anarchist figures in the book—arrived, it was dominated by Russian Jews. The crowding was almost unthinkable. In modern-day Manhattan, where residences can be efficiently stacked upwards in vertical skyscrapers, the average population density is roughly 100 people per acre. When Emma Goldman first strolled through the streets of what was then called the Tenth Ward, the low-rise buildings around her somehow accommodated a population density five times greater than that.

And then, only a few stops on the subway north of the LES, there’s "Millionaire's Row,” the stretch of enormous mansions constructed by the industrialists of the Gilded Age, where Goldman strolls with her friend Modska Aronstam, a sensitive illustrator and sometime radical, apparently part of a “thruple” with Berkman and Goldman. (When Goldman points out the scandalous contrast between the midtown mansions and the tenement squalor just south of them, Aronstam counters: “My main objection is that they have such bad taste—those buildings are ugly.”) A few blocks away, a daring undercover operation by a young Italian detective named Amedeo Polignani foils a plot to bomb the newly-consecrated St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a plot that had been hatched in an anarchist circle in East Harlem, where Goldman and Berkman set up shop in the 1910s.

The “outer boroughs” feature prominently as well. One of my favorite sequences in the book takes place in the Long Meadow of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the young lovers Goldman and Berkman romance each other discussing the revolutionary valor of Czar Alexander II’s assassins. Even Staten Island gets a visit: while plotting his (ultimately failed) assassination attempt on the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, Berkman decamps to the still mostly rural island to test the dynamite bombs he’s constructed for the job. (He ultimately opts for a revolver.)

I hadn’t thought about it until I compiled this geographic survey of the narrative, but the final pages of the book complete the NYC tour by taking the reader out onto the islands in New York Harbor, where Goldman has a fateful encounter with J. Edgar Hoover on Ellis Island, and then out through the tidal strait of the Narrows onboard the “Red Ark” that carries Goldman and Berkman along with 247 other deported radicals to Soviet Russia in 1919. “The tall skyscrapers, their outlines dimmed, looked like fairy castles lit by winking stars,” Berkman later wrote of that final exodus, “and then all was swallowed in the distance.”

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One reason that litany is so magical to me is that almost all those places conjure up very specific memories in my head, independent of their narrative significance in The Infernal Machine. I walked by the old police headquarters on my way to work every day in my twenties when I was editing the web magazine FEED; we must have spent more than a thousand hours in the Long Meadow when our kids were young and needed space to roam. Many of those places have changed in the century that has passed since Berkman and Goldman sailed out through the Narrows. The police building has been converted into luxury condos; Ellis Island is a museum; Grand Central Palace—the enormous exhibition space straddling the rail lines running north of Grand Central Station where Berkman delivers an incendiary speech after returning from prison—no longer exists.

But despite those changes, that older New York is still very much imaginable—even walking through the permanent daylight of Times Square and its animated LED Megatron billboards. What is harder for my mind to imagine is the relentless violence in the streets of the city during that period, much of it political. Infernal Machine describes dozens of bombings and assassinations that took place in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but the total number was almost incomprehensibly larger: the city’s chief bomb inspector either defused or surveyed the wreckage from seven thousand bombs over his thirty year career. (Hence my worry that Infernal had too many crimes to fit the classic true crime genre—it felt almost closer to military history.) The sheer scale of that carnage was, of course, one of the main reasons I got interested in writing the book in the first place, as a study in how political violence becomes normalized in a society. I wrote it as a work of history, a reminder of how much has changed over the last century, and not as a warning about potential carnage to come. Here’s hoping it stays that way.

Owen Eagan, the city’s Inspector of Combustibles, with two defused bombs.