The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

David Grann has a clean, solid prose style, much like his New Yorker colleague John McPhee. When he’s writing about hunting for giant squid, or about the system of water tunnels under New York City, you might almost think you were reading the man Paul Theroux called “Doc” in honor of his quiet expertise about everything.

But most of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes takes place in darker territory. It’s hard to imagine any book of McPhee’s that could be subtitled “Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.” Grann writes about an amnesiac fireman who survived 9/11, the death by garroting of a Sherlock Holmes scholar, the mob-friendly city of Youngstown, Ohio, and how a Haitian death-squad boss became a real estate agent in Brooklyn. Balding, beefy, and unshaven in his author photo, Grann even looks like a tough guy.

Not surprisingly for a book that discusses a lot of bad behavior, the subject of the death penalty arises more than once. In “Trial by Fire,” Grann looks at the case of a Texas man who was sentenced to death for torching his house and killing his little girls, based on strong circumstantial evidence and what seemed like irrefutable testimony from arson experts. But by the end of the story you are convinced that what passes for expert testimony, at least on this subject, is a tissue of myths and mistaken assumptions. And you may well believe that the state of Texas executed an innocent man. (Not for the first time, I’m sure.)

Yet later in the book, in a chilling piece on the Aryan Brotherhood, Grann lays the basis for one of the stronger arguments I’ve heard for the death penalty. The Aryan Brotherhood is an extraordinarily violent gang with deep roots in the American prison system. Its leaders have proven capable not only of ordering murders from solitary cells in supermax prisons (using an ingenious code) but killing people inside the prisons. Many of the killers are already serving life sentences. How do you stop them? And how can you punish them more than they’re being punished already? Grann describes the thinking of Gregory Jessner, the mild-mannered but exceptionally brave prosecutor who set out to dismantle the Aryan Brotherhood.

In an audacious move, Jessner decided to pursue the death penalty for nearly all the gang’s top leaders. “It’s the only arrow left in our quiver,” he told me. “I think even a lot of people who are against the death penalty in general would recognize that in this particular instance, where people are committing murder repeatedly from behind bars, there is little other option.”

What does Grann himself think about the death penalty? He doesn’t say. Like McPhee, who for most of his career has let slip only occasional tidbits about himself (a bit more in The Crofter and the Laird and Silk Parachute), Grann keeps his focus on his subject.