Inventing The Infernal Machine

It's publication day for my fourteenth book.

Most of what follows is going to be me telling you about something I happen to think I do well as an author, so just to keep me honest, let's start with some of my more obvious failings. I am chronically indifferent to—and challenged by—physical descriptions; I really have to work at representing the stories I tell visually. I am also the world's laziest reporter. I will do just about anything to justify not interviewing a potential expert for the essays or books I write. (I much prefer wandering around by myself in the archive, learning through reading not conversation.) As I’ve “matured” as a writer, and placed more emphasis on intelligibility, I think my sentences have gotten a little less syntactically or rhetorically ambitious. Certainly I have to force myself to make them more interesting and varied in the edit.

I truly believe these are flaws, not just quirks—I’d write better books without these weaknesses.

What I am good at is this:

That's the table of contents for The Infernal Machine, my new book landing on bookstore shelves today. I had something similar going for Enemy Of All Mankind:

Figuring out those structures—the sequence of events and ideas that they map; the titles; the higher-level patterns of parts and epilogues—is the most comprehensive thinking that I do in writing a book, the decisions that really force me to see all the various parts and how they can be made to interact. If you get a chance to read it, you'll see that Infernal Machine has this slightly crazy structure for the first third of the book, where you're bouncing back and forth between five distinct through-lines with only the most tenuous of connections between them: Nobel inventing dynamite; Kropotkin building the alt-Darwinian theory of “mutual aid”; Berthillon inventing forensics; the Russians inventing terrorism; New York City basically being awful at police work. I don’t spend many words handholding the reader in those chapters, explaining how the threads are all going to come together, but I did spend a ton of time thinking about what the exact right amount of handholding was. You want it to feel slightly mysterious, and mystery depends on deliberately withholding information or explanations. But there’s a point at which mystery drifts into incoherence. 

When I first circulated the manuscript to my little kitchen cabinet of early readers, the question that I immediately hit them with was: “Do you trust that I’m going to weave all these threads together, or are you just lost?” It’s incredibly hard to tell that sort of thing when you’re in the middle of writing out a structure like that. All the confusing bits seem obvious to you, and all the surprising-in-a-good-way bits seem obvious to you as well. Your assessment of the thing is flattened out from having spent too much time with it.

What I’m most proud of with Infernal Machine is that, on some level, I had to invent the story, or piece it together from a collection of disparate parts. ((If you’re interested in this part of the writing processing, I discuss the challenges and the rewards of figuring out complex structure in this section of my How I Write conversation with David Perell.) With Ghost Map and Enemy of All Mankind, there was an existing historical narrative—not terribly well-known compared to, say, the Civil War, but coherent enough that the core facts of each case had been written about many times before: John Snow solving the riddle of cholera during the 1854 outbreak; the pirate Henry Every attacking an Indian treasure ship and then disappearing in 1695. I took the foundation of those events and built a more idiosyncratic and multi-threaded structure on top of them: Ghost Map about the history of cities and waste; Enemy about the birth of multinational capitalism. But the foundation was a known entity when I sat down to write each of those stories.

Not so with Infernal Machine. There were some wonderful histories of anarchism, like Paul and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma; a number of comprehensive histories of forensic science; a few terrific books that looked into the clash between anarchism and the NYPD in the 1910s, like Bevely Gage’s The Day Wall Street Exploded and Thai Jones’ More Powerful Than Dynamite. But it wasn’t obvious from the outset that there was a single book that would logically encompass Nobel inventing dynamite in the 1860s; Kropotkin first dreaming of anarchist notions of mutual aid in Siberia; the assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg in 1881; the reform movements inside the NYPD; J. Edgar Hoover moonlighting at the Library of Congress as a teenager; all the way to Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman’s “disappointment” in post-Revolutionary Russia in the early 1920s. It actually took about two years of exploring and experimenting to get to that structure. I did two separate rounds of book proposals that were exclusively focused on the adoption of forensic science by the NYPD in the 1900-1920 period that ended up just feeling too small, too narrowly in the true-crime genre. But then I started noticing just how many newspaper articles in the period were discussing anarchist bombs, and that set me down a whole path that led to Goldman, Berkman, and Kropotkin—and then eventually to Nobel—and once I had that whole framework, I knew I had something I could work with.

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One other thing about the table of contents: I love dreaming up chapter titles. I’ve always been attracted to books where you have the variety of chapter titles like those in Infernal Machine: some are phrases drawn from dialogue, like “They Are Such Fine And Beautiful Characters” or “She Fears Not Who Follows Her” in Enemy; some are just dates; some are proper names and titles from the archive: “The People Versus Charles Crispi.” Maybe my favorite—and if it were just a slightly different book I would have loved to use this as the title for the whole thing—is the snippet from Woody Guthrie’s eulogy for the Ludlow Massacre: “Down Inside The Cave To Sleep.” 

I tell the story of Ludlow very quickly in Infernal—it almost happens offscreen, though it is a central turning point in the plot (and indeed in American labor history.) Howard Zinn called it “one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers and corporate capital in the history of the country.” The events, in brief, were this: on April 20, 1914, two National Guard units commanded by a Rockefeller deputy began laying down machine gun fire across tent cities of striking  miners outside Ludlow, Colorado. Some of the strikers managed to escape into the hills, while others huddled in underground bunkers that had been dug for precisely such a situation. That night, the Guard swept into the tent city and set it ablaze. Initial accounts suggested that, miraculously, only a handful of people had perished in the entire conflict. But the next morning, a telephone linesman inspecting the wreckage heard muted cries beneath an iron cot that had survived the inferno. When he dragged the cot away from the pit it had been designed to conceal, he found two women struggling for survival, huddled together in the earth. Around them were the blackened corpses of thirteen victims. Eleven of them were children.

Here’s what Guthrie wrote to commemorate the tragedy:  

It was early springtime when the strike was on,
They drove us miners out of doors,
Out from the houses that the company owned,
We moved into tents up at old Ludlow.

I was worried bad about my children,
Soldiers guarding the railroad bridge,
Every once in a while a bullet would fly,
Kick up gravel under my feet.

We were so afraid you would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,
Carried our young ones and pregnant women
Down inside the cave to sleep.

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So here we go: book number fourteen, and really the fourth in the series of narrative history books: The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air, Enemy Of All Mankind, and now The Infernal Machine. If you’re interested in learning more about the book, The Times just ran a generous review from Clyde Haberman. I hope you can pick up a copy, and if you’re in the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC, I hope you can swing by one of the events we’re holding over the next 10 days or so—particularly any of you who are in Seattle where I have less of a home team advantage for bringing folks out to the event. Details here: 

May 14, 6pm: Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA 

May 15, 7pm: Books Inc, Palo Alto, CA

May 16, 7pm: Third Place Books, Seattle

May 22, 7pm: Powerhouse Area, Brooklyn