Crisp prose of ‘Incendiary’ offers explosive look at New York City bomb case
One of the comforting byproducts of reading historical non-fiction is that it can leave you feeling profoundly grateful.
Living in the present, it’s natural to feel that today’s tragedies are the worst. But past is indeed prologue, as evidenced in Incendiary (Minotaur, 257 pp., out of four), **** Michael Cannell’s riveting account of a New Yorker who terrorized Gothamites in the 1950s by setting 32 bombs over 16 years.
Whatever ills plague our modern times, it’s hard not to look back at the sheer terror caused by the tabloid-dubbed “Mad Bomber of New York” — who left his expertly crafted pipe bombs in movie theaters, phone booths and other public places — and feel that today’s society is an oasis of calm. At the very least, it likely wouldn’t take law enforcement nearly two decades to get their man today.
But Incendiary is far more than just a historical retelling of one man’s lunatic rampage, a man whose identity I’ll keep concealed in deference to the way Cannell deftly unfolds his drama.
Rather, the book’s subtitle reveals the larger canvas: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling. The search for the bomber in fact ushered in a new era in police work, one as significant as the creation of the first bomb squad in turn-of-the-century New York.
Frustrated by their inability to catch their man, police officials finally turned to a psychiatrist, James Brussel, for help. Using a variety of clues that included a trove of angry anonymous letters written to New York newspapers, Brussel wound up presciently describing with uncanny detail a ghost that would be made flesh — eventually.
Much of Incendiary’s power comes from Cannell’s writing, whose meticulousness mirrors that of his subject’s artful if deplorable creations. (Incredibly and thankfully, the bomber’s handiwork maimed but did not kill.)
With crisp yet compelling prose, Cannell takes readers back to mid-century New York, with its warring newspapers and feuding ethnicities.
After describing passing thunderstorms, Cannell notes that the weather gave New Yorkers “a slight respite from a week of stabbing heat that sunbaked pavement and singed the edges of maple leaves in Central Park. All the pleasures of a midsummer Sunday lay in store ...”
Cannell brought the same vivid sense of place and drama to 2011’s
The Limit, which chronicled life and death on the Formula One Grand Prix circuit in 1961. Rumors of movie projects still swirl around that book, as they may well start to kindle with Incendiary.
The elements are all there. A possessed criminal, a determined police force and the beginning of a pivotal new use for psychiatry. And if nothing else, reading In
cendiary will make a stroll through New York in 2017 feel infinitely safer than that same jittery jaunt a half-century earlier.