Just Like Sherlock Holmes - But All True

David Grann, Staples Class of 1985, returned to Westport on Wednesday to talk about his blossoming career as an award-winning writer whose quirky investigations provide glimpses into the human condition, probe good and evil and illuminate large themes.

His subject as a guest speaker at the Westport Public Library was The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession, a collection of articles published in March. Most were published first in The New Yorker magazine where he has been a staff writer since 2003. Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z, hit The New York Times bestseller list the week it first appeared in February of last year.

Grann’s talk highlighted his September 7, 2009 New Yorker piece, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” It’s a chronicle of Grann’s intensive investigation of the prosecution of Cameron Todd Willingham, a father of three, on charges he deliberately set his home on fire, an act of arson that claimed the lives of his children. A jury found him guilty after deliberating one hour and he was executed in 2004.

But soon after the execution, serious doubts arose about Willingham’s guilt, Grann explained. A fire investigator reviewed key documents in the case and an hour-long video of the aftermath of the fire scene. He found nothing to suggest to a serious arson investigator that arson was involved. “It was just a fire,” he concluded.

The state of Texas ordered an unprecedented re-examination of the case; the fire forensic expert it hired said the finding of arson was unsupportable and he concluded the key testimony of a fire marshal at the trial was “hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics.”

Grann, intrigued by the possibility that Texas had killed an innocent man, spent a year conducting his own intensive parallel investigation. After spending days with fire experts, his article concludes that the 20 “indicators” of evidence relied on by the prosecution “proved to be old-wives’ tales.”

 “There was overwhelming evidence of, if not actual innocence, a wrongful execution,” said Grann.

Grann’s storytelling employs novelistic techniques, he told the library audience of 45. He began the Willingham piece setting out the prosecution’s case.

"By the end of that section, I assure you you will have no doubt of Willingham’s guilt,” he said. But by reaching out to reliable experts, his probing artfully turns the tables around. Readers are unable to look away from the piece without feeling a fomenting sense of anguish for Willingham and a criminal justice system that had gone seriously off the track.

Grann employs the same investigatory and literary techniques to probe 11 other true-life mysteries in his collection, from the death of a Sherlock Holmes aficiando to a classic con man caught up in someone else’s deceptions.

“I was always reading Sherlock Holmes" while growing up in Westport and attending the public schools here, he said.  He was attracted to Holmes’ fictional ability to “restore order to a bewildering universe,” he writes in the introduction to the book.

 “It is the messiness of life, and the human struggle to make sense of it, that drew me to the subjects in this collection.” Grann is fond of quoting Holmes’ dictum: “Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

In each piece in the collection, his aim is to ascertain the truth of what really happened.

“Reporting, like detective work, is a process of elimination,” he writes. “It requires that you gather and probe innumerable versions of a story until, to borrow a phrase from Sherlock Holmes, ‘the one which remains must be the truth.’”

The common element in each of Grann’s 12 stories is intrigue.

“Unlike the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, these tales are all true. The protagonists are mortal: as with Dr. Watson, they can observe, but they don’t necessarily see,” he writes.

“Pieces of the puzzle often remain elusive. Their stories do not always end happily,” he continues. “Some of the characters are driven to deception and murder. Others go mad.”

 One of Grann’s adventures takes him to New Zealand where he joins up with a “squid squad” consisting of an academic and graduate student, two of a great number of marine sleuths who, according to Grann, are obsessed with finding a living giant squid.

 “There is no report of one ever having been seen alive,” he said. “There are giant squid hunters who, like Ahab, wander the world in search of the giant squid,” he said. Part of the fascination is their size, with 60-foot tentacles and eyes the size of hub caps.

“We know they’re real because their tentacles have been found washed ashore,” he said.

“The Squid Hunter” is Grann’s harrowing account of a seaborne quest he joined. The Squid Squad went out in a 20-foot skiff despite a threatening typhoon and the conditions – walls of 20-foot waves encountered in the dark, when the giant squid are thought to be lurking at sea level - were life-threatening.

By luck, they captured a tiny creature with all the characteristics of a baby squid – but as they were transferring it to a larger container it disappeared.

That event – devastating for the squid hunter - was revelatory of human character, including his own, Grann acknowledged. He was a journalist who feared for his reputation if he came back from the costly journey without a giant squid on his literary belt.

But he rationalized the near-miss as being a perfect ending by leaving his protagonist in his obsessive state, perhaps with greater self-understanding.

The other true-life mysteries are equally absorbing, written by a master of the suspenseful retelling.

“Thank you! You’re keeping my babies in diapers,” said the 41-year-old author jokingly, the father of two young children, as he autographed the six copies of his book a fan placed in front of him after his talk.

Grann’s best-seller, The Lost City of Z, has been translated into 20 languages. It’s the story of legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in the Amazon with his son in 1925 while on a quest for the lost city of Z. Grann retraced the explorer’s travels and made his own discoveries.

Unlike 100 predecessors who died or disappeared in similar quests for Fawcett's remains and the lost city, Grann’s journey, as retold, has been optioned by Hollywood.

Grann’s mother Phyllis was head of Putnam-Penguin books and his father, Victor, is a hematologist-oncologist. Grann now lives in Westchester County and his parents live in New York.