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1. Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021407 Grann, David, author. Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI / David Grann. New York : Doubleday, [2016] pages cm E99.O8 G675 2016 ISBN: 9780385534246 (hardcover) 2. The devil and Sherlock Holmes : tales of murder, madness, and obsession https://lccn.loc.gov/2009042230 Grann, David. The devil and Sherlock Holmes : tales of murder, madness, and obsession / David Grann. 1st ed. New York : Doubleday, c2010. xi, 338 p. ; 25 cm. PN4874.G672 A25 2010 ISBN: 9780385517928

• Wikipedia -

  David Grann
  David grann 2010.jpg
  Grann at the 2010 Texas Book Festival
  Born March 10, 1967 (age 50)
  New York City
  Occupation Staff writer, author, journalist
  Nationality American
  Alma mater Connecticut College
  Notable works The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
  Notable awards Thomas J. Watson Fellowship
  George Polk Awards
  Spouse Kyra Darnton (m. 2000)
  Children 2
  Website
  davidgrann.com
  David Grann (born March 10, 1967) is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and a best-selling author.
  His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was published by Doubleday in February 2009. After its first week of publication, it debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at #4.[1]
  Grann's articles have been collected in several anthologies, including What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001, The Best American Crime Writing of 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Sports Writing of 2003 and 2006.[2] He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard.[2] According to a profile in Slate, Grann has a reputation as a "workhorse reporter", which has made him a popular journalist who "inspires a devotion in readers that can border on the obsessive."[3]
  Contents [hide]
  1 Career
  1.1 The Lost City of Z
  1.2 Other books
  2 Personal life
  3 Awards
  4 Bibliography
  4.1 Books
  4.2 Articles
  5 References
  6 External links
  Career[edit]
  Born in New York City, Grann graduated from Connecticut College in 1989 with a B.A. in Government.[4] He received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and conducted research in Mexico, where he began his career as a freelance journalist.[4] He received a master's degree in international relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1993.[2][5] At that point primarily interested in fiction, Grann hoped to develop a career as a novelist.[6]
  His journalism career began after he was hired in 1994 as a copy editor at The Hill, a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper covering the United States Congress.[2] The same year, he earned a master's degree in creative writing from Boston University,[2][5] where he taught courses in creative writing and fiction.[6] He was named The Hill's executive editor in 1995.[2][4]
  In 1996, Grann became a senior editor at The New Republic.[2][5] He joined The New Yorker in 2003 as a staff writer.[2][4] He was a finalist for the Michael Kelly Award in 2005.[7]
  In 2009 he received both the George Polk Award and Sigma Delta Chi Award for his New Yorker piece "Trial By Fire", about Cameron Todd Willingham. It has been described as the first thoroughly documented case of the execution of an innocent man under the modern American judicial system.[citation needed]
  Another New Yorker investigative article, "The Mark of a Masterpiece", raised questions about the methods of Peter Paul Biro, who claimed to use fingerprints to help authenticate lost masterpieces.[8] Biro sued Grann and The New Yorker for libel,[9][10] but the case was summarily dismissed.[11][12] The article was a finalist for the 2010 National Magazine Award.[13]
  The Lost City of Z[edit]
  Grann's 2009 non-fiction book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon recounts the odyssey of the notable British explorer, Captain Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for the Lost City of Z. For decades, explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of both his party and the Lost City of Z. More than 100 people died or disappeared (and were presumed dead) seeking Fawcett. Grann also trekked into the Amazon. In his book, he reveals new evidence about how Fawcett died and shows that "Z" may have existed.[14]
  The book was optioned by Brad Pitt's Plan B production company and Paramount Pictures.[15] It was adapted as a feature film of the same name and released in 2016.
  Other books[edit]
  An anthology of twelve previously published Grann essays, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, was published in March 2010.
  In March 2014, Grann said he was working on a new book about the Osage Indian murders, "one of the most sinister crimes in American history."[16] His book Killers of the Flower Moon: An American Crime and the Birth of the FBI was published in 2017.
  Personal life[edit]
  In 2000 Grann married Kyra Darnton, a television producer and daughter of John Darnton. He has curated the George Polk Awards.[5] The couple has two children. As of 2009 they resided in New York City.[4]
  Awards[edit]
  Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1989)
  Michael Kelly award, finalist (2005)
  George Polk Awards (2009)
  Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist (2009)
  National Magazine Awards, finalist (2010)
  Bibliography[edit]
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Books[edit]
  The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009)
  The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession (2010)
  Killers of the Flower Moon: An American Crime and the Birth of the FBI (2017)[17][18]
  Articles[edit]
  "The Selling of the Scandal", The New Republic, September 28, 1998.
  "The Stasi and the Swan - The last spy story of the cold war." The New Republic, April 19, 1999.
  "Crimetown USA - The city that fell in love with the mob.", The New Republic, July 10, 2000.
  "Giving "The Devil" His Due", The Atlantic Monthly, June 2001.
  "Which Way Did He Run?", The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2002.
  "Baseball Without Metaphor", The New York Times Magazine, September 1, 2002.
  "The Old Man and the Gun - Forrest Tucker had a long career robbing banks, and he wasn't willing to retire", The New Yorker, January 27, 2003.
  "The Price of Power", The New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2003.
  "City of Water - Can an intricate and antiquated maze of tunnels continue to sustain New York?", The New Yorker, September 1, 2003.
  "The Brand - How the Aryan Brotherhood became the most murderous prison gang in America", The New Yorker, February 16, 2004.
  "The Squid Hunter - Can Steve O'Shea capture the sea's most elusive creature", The New Yorker, May 24, 2004.
  "Inside Dope - Mark Halperin and the transformation of the Washington establishment", The New Yorker, October 25, 2004.
  "Mysterious Circumstances - The strange death of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic", The New Yorker, December 13, 2004.
  "Stealing Time - What makes Rickey Henderson run?", The New Yorker, September 12, 2005.
  "The Lost City of Z - A quest to uncover the secrets of the Amazon", The New Yorker September 19, 2005.
  "True Crime - A postmodern murder mystery", The New Yorker, February 11, 2008.
  "The Chameleon - The many lives of Frédéric Bourdin", The New Yorker, August 11, 2008.
  "The Fall - John McCain's choices", The New Yorker, November 17, 2008.
  "Trial by Fire - Did Texas execute an innocent man?", The New Yorker, September 7, 2009.
  "The Mark of a Masterpiece" - The man who keeps finding famous fingerprints on uncelebrated works of art, The New Yorker, July 12 & 19, 2010.
  "A Murder Foretold - Unravelling the Ultimate Political Conspiracy", The New Yorker, April 4, 2011.
  "The Yankee Comandante - A story of love, revolution, and betrayal", The New Yorker, May 28, 2012.
  "The Marked Woman - How an Osage Indian family became the prime target of one of the most sinister crimes in American history", The New Yorker, March 1, 2017.

• New Yorker - http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-grann

  Contributor

  David Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. He is the author of “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and his stories have appeared in several anthologies, including “What We Saw: The Events of September 11, 2001”; “The Best American Crime Writing,” of 2004, 2005, and 2009; and “The Best American Sports Writing,” of 2003 and 2006. A 2005 finalist for the Michael Kelly Award for the “fearless pursuit and expression of truth,” Grann has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal.
  Before joining The New Yorker, Grann was a senior editor at The New Republic and, from 1995 to 1996, the executive editor of the newspaper The Hill. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and in creative writing from Boston University. After graduating from Connecticut College, in 1989, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.

• David Grann Website - https://www.davidgrann.com/

  David Grann is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. His latest book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, will be released in April. Based on years of research, it explores one of the most sinister crimes and racial injustices in American history.

  His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, became a #1 New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the book was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Bloomberg, Publishers Weekly, and the Christian Science Monitor, and it also won the Indies Choice award for the best nonfiction book of that year.

  The Lost City of Z has been adapted into a major motion picture, which will be released in theaters in April 2017. Produced by Brad Pitt’s production company, the film is directed by James Gray and stars Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson, and Tom Holland.

  Grann’s other book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, contains many of his New Yorker stories, and was named by Men’s Journal one of the best true crime books ever written. The stories in the collection focus on everything from the mysterious death of the world’s greatest Sherlock Holmes expert to a Polish writer who might have left clues to a real murder in his postmodern novel. Another piece, “Trial by Fire," exposed how junk science led to the execution of a likely innocent man in Texas. The story received a George Polk award for outstanding journalism and a Silver Gavel award for fostering the public’s understanding of the justice system, and the piece was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his opinion about the constitutionality of the death penalty

  His stories have also been a source of material for feature films. “Old Man and the Gun”—which is in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, and is about an aging stick-up man and prison escape artist—is slated to be directed by David Lowery and to star Robert Redford. Another story, “The Yankee Comandante,” is being developed into a film by George Clooney.

  Over the years, Grann’s stories have appeared in The Best American Crime Writing; The Best American Sports Writing; and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has previously written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic.

  Before joining The New Yorker in 2003, Grann was a senior editor at The New Republic, and, from 1995 until 1996, the executive editor of the newspaper The Hill. He holds master’s degrees in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy as well as in creative writing from Boston University. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1989, he received a Thomas Watson Fellowship and did research in Mexico, where he began his career in journalism. He currently lives in New York with his wife and two children.

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/killers-of-the-flower-moon-inside-new-true-crime-epic-w476689

  'Killers of the Flower Moon': Inside David Grann's New True-Crime Epic
  New book about a century-old string of murders had the author chasing a real-life Faulkner tale – one which almost made him lose his mind

  By Sean Woods
  April 17, 2017

  How do you follow up a critically acclaimed, international bestseller, now-Hollywood movie like The Lost City of Z? If you're author David Grann, you spend half a decade reporting on one of the darkest and most obscure chapters in American history – when members of the the Osage tribe of Oklahoma, newly rich from the discovery of oil on their lands, began being brutally murdered off in the 1920s.

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  In his masterful new book Killers of the Flower of the Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which comes out this week, Grann chronicles a tale of murder, betrayal, heroism and a nation's struggle to leave its frontier culture behind and enter the modern world. At the beginning of the last century, during the oil boom, massive oil reserves were discovered on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. In a short period of time, the impoverished Indians became some of the wealthiest people in the country. And then they started getting murdered. Men and women were poisoned, blown up and shot at a horrific rate, and the corrupt and incompetent local law enforcement proved useless at stopping the bloodshed, forcing the federal government to step in. Led by an ambitious young bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover who was determined to crack the case, the feds found themselves facing a vast and ruthless conspiracy that would stop at nothing – even the killing of friends and family – to steal the Osage's mineral rights.

  Filled with almost mythic characters from our past – stoic Texas Rangers, corrupt robber barons, private detectives, and murderous desperadoes like the Al Spencer gang – Grann's story amounts to a secret history of the American frontier. In part a chilling true crime mystery, the book also works on a much deeper level, deftly depicting the brutal transition of a young country lurching towards modernity but unable to leave behind its violent and racist nature. It's a haunting tale of unimaginable betrayal, naked greed and the birth of modern law enforcement.

  The Osage case is almost 100 years old, but Grann says the reporting and writing was some of the most intense of his career. "This is as close a story to good and evil as I ever came across," Grann says. "I spent so much time with the evil that it was very disconcerting. But I really was determined not to just catalog the victims. I wanted to find the descendants who could help try to give the dead some voice."

  How did you come upon the story? It's a story I imagine a lot of Americans are not familiar with.
  I had never heard of it. A historian mentioned it to me, and I was surprised I'd never read anything about it, never heard anything about it in school. And then I kind of did two things: I began to write [Freedom of Information Act] letters to government agencies and courthouses to see what materials existed. Then I went out to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. I describe the scene in the book where I visited the Osage museum, and the museum director showed me a panorama photo on the wall of the members of the tribe taken in 1924. But there was this panel that was missing. I asked her why. She told me it was too painful to look at, then she pointed to the missing piece and said the devil was standing right there. Then she went down into the basement. She took out that missing panel and it had an image peering out from the side of one of the killers.

  Seeing that face sent you on your path?
  For me, that was really kind of a turning point, and I really wanted to tell that story because, one: Here was something that didn't take place that long ago, in the 1920s. And while the Osage couldn't forget, this country had basically cut out the panel from our memory. And then, obviously, it began a longer period of trying to kind of understand who the devil was. Was he this single evil figure? What were the other dimensions of the conspiracy? Figuring that out sent me on my way.

  One of the characters, William Hale, who is dubbed the King of the Osage Hills, plays a pivotal role. You describe him as almost like William Faulkner's great villain Sutpen from Absalom, Absalom!
  He's just kind of a quintessential American figure in the sense that he comes from nothing. He shows up in the Osage territory right at the turn of the century. Shows up on a horse and in rags. He's this man from nowhere; he has no discernible past. And he completely reinvents himself and becomes this powerful cattle baron who refers to himself as the Reverend. And of course, the question will always be: What is his past? He was very skillful at obscuring the means of his own transformation. I don't want to give too much away. In all my 30 years of reporting, I don't think I have ever crossed a character quite so astonishing as him. He really was like something out of a Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy novel.

  The book is also about the birth of a federal law enforcement agency: the FBI. And while J. Edgar Hoover is just as Machiavellian and paranoid from the start as one would expect, I found the lead investigator on this case, Tom White, to be an incredibly admirable character.
  Yeah, he's very quietly good. It's funny because reporters are always trying to dig and find a skeleton. But he just had a quiet goodness. He's not superhuman. He makes mistakes. One of the things that was so striking to me was when he later became a warden, he's abducted and shot and nearly dies. And when one of the people who was part of that abduction was caught, White gives the instructions to the guards while he's basically lying near death, "Don't beat him up." And that's not a common thing. Years later, the inmate reached out to White and they became friends. As an old man, he went to visit White. And here are these two old men, you know, having lived a century on opposite sides of the law with this unusual friendship – that involves a kind of Christian forgiveness. I spoke to somebody that actually interviewed this prisoner, and the inmate just kept saying White was the greatest man, the most decent man he'd ever known.

  In a way, White is the flip side of many of the villains of this piece, who are also so very American and part of the frontier. He sounds like a real-life Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda.
  Yeah, all these individuals are caught up in this crucible, which I saw to be the formation of a modern country. And they are all transformative in a way. You have many villains who transform themselves through greed and murder. And then you have others like Tom White who go through the same transformation – born in a log cabin, policing the frontier at a time when justice was pretty raw. There's a picture for me that's so amazing: White's got a cowboy hat, he's riding a horse, and he's got a gun. In a later picture, you see him with a fedora, he's trying to use fingerprints and he's got to file paperwork, which I just always love, because he clearly hated the paperwork.

  What about the Osage themselves, the victims of such horrific crimes?
  Mollie Burkhart to me is no less a remarkable figure, because she's also in this crucible – this country that's being born out of all of these clashing forces and, to some degree, original sin. She's born in the wigwam and she's speaking Osage and then in a 30-year span, she's living in a mansion. She has a white husband. She speaks English. She has white servants. She kind of is straddling, the way Tom White was straddling two centuries – but in her case, she's straddling two civilizations. And her family is being targeted by an American conspiracy. And yet she's trying to get justice – which took such quiet courage.

  nfession in Deaths of Osages Reported. Guthrie, Oklahoma: Important developments in the Osage Indian murder investigation before a Federal Grand Jury were seen, January 11, at Guthrie, Oklahoma, in semi-official information that Ernest Burkhardt, nephew of W.R. Hale, termed 'King of the Osage Hills,' had made a confession. The death penalty will be asked by federal prosecutors in the Hale trial. Above, W.K. Hale, the wealthy ranchman who is being held. January 12, 1926.
  nfession in Deaths of Osages Reported. Guthrie, Oklahoma: Important developments in the Osage Indian murder investigation before a Federal Grand Jury were seen, January 11, at Guthrie, Oklahoma, in semi-official information that Ernest Burkhardt, nephew of W.R. Hale, termed 'King of the Osage Hills,' had made a confession. The death penalty will be asked by federal prosecutors in the Hale trial. Above, W.K. Hale, the wealthy ranchman who is being held. January 12, 1926. Bettman/Getty
  Her bravery in the face of such terrible violence and fear is striking.
  Yeah, everyone around her is getting murdered. You don't know who is conspiring against you. She was kind of the driving force to try to solve some of the murders, and that put a bull's eye on her. In many ways, this is a story of quiet goodness and innocence and a lot of evil. It's a microcosm of good and evil. It's a microcosm of the clash of civilizations. It's the microcosm of kind of the birth of law enforcement.

  Let's shift to Hoover. I couldn't help but think what a different country it would've been if somebody like Tom White had been running the FBI. But I don't think White could've created the bureaucracy that Hoover created.
  No, he couldn't have. He was much more of a man of action. He didn't have the political ambitions. Certainly not any of the Machiavellian or political ambitions of Hoover. Hoover's interest in the case is about burnishing his ego and burnishing his reputation. And of course, he never gives credit to any of the investigators that do all the work.

  Ah, that's tragic.
  It's really kind of tragic. I mean, what's amazing is, the only people who end up recognizing the investigators who did the work were the Osage. Hoover would never name any of them, simply because he wanted the credit for himself.

  What did this case teach you about the FBI?
  The case showed there were kind of these two sides to the bureau: When it sticks to investigatory techniques, and the facts, and keeps its nose out of all the other stuff, it's a very powerful and effective organization. You really could see the need for the FBI with a case like this because there was so much local corruption. But on the other hand, it also created a really powerful organization, which if in the wrong hands or bent the wrong way can be corrupted itself. So you see both sides of the FBI right from its very origins, playing out of this case.

  What did you learn about Hoover, just as a person?
  Oh, you can see the seeds and early emblems of his character, his paranoia, his concern with scandal.

  You met with many descendants of the survivors of these crimes. What was that like?
  One of the things I found with so many of these cases was people were still living with this three generations on. There wasn't a kind of clean resolution, and you could see how it still really profoundly affected people.

  There is some justice in the book, but one of the things the FBI does is try to wrap it up and tie a bow on this thing.
  They do. There was a lot of pressure from Hoover to resolve the case. It's almost a psychological thing. I think it is much easier to conceive of a crime when you have a singular villain. And the idea that the law comes in and removes that evil, then society returns to normal, that's kind of the construct we all live with. That's the way we think of crime stories. But it's far more frightening to conceive of the possibility that there are many, many ordinary people complicit in a crime.

  So all of society was really to blame?
  It's societal. It's funny – well not funny, but when I began the story I was thinking, you know, I was like, 'It's a whodunnit kind of thing, right?' And by the end, what I said to my wife was, like, 'Who didn't do it?' That's what's so shocking.

  Three members of the Osage tribe who met death in suspicious circumstances: Henry Roan, Lizzie Q. and Charles Whitehorn. Bettman/Getty
  It really was a vast conspiracy.
  It's one of the rare times – as a reporter, 99 percent of my job and life is just basically knocking down conspiracies. I always say anytime people think of conspiracy theories [that] it's usually just a bunch of incompetence, people just fumbling and messing up, but people want to attribute this kind of great design to something. Yet this was a case where there really was a conspiracy. One of the things that I wanted to try to show, hopefully, in the book, by telling it through three different points of view ­– the Osage and Mollie Burkhart, Tom White and then me in the present – was to show the process of the accumulation of knowledge that only unfolds over time. Each person, as they live through history, can't see it all. There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

  Mollie has limited knowledge, and she's trying her best to see through the murk. Tom White is doing his best to solve the case, and then in the last section, I'm hopefully trying to fill in some of the blanks that have emerged over time. But getting back to your question, I discovered there is a limited trail of evidence; there are gaps. I had always kind of assumed that history was kind of a horror that you know. And this was a story that left me profoundly with a sensation of maybe the real horror is what we don't know.

  There were so many more murderers out there who went unpunished.
  Yeah. And how many murders were there? And how many conspirators got away and died natural deaths and absconded with money?

  This history is still very much alive for the Osage, no?
  I just spoke to an Osage army veteran [who had served in] Afghanistan, who during the Standing Rock protest basically walked hundreds of miles from Oklahoma to North Dakota. When I spoke to him, he said, "I was thinking about the Osage murders." The issue is very different, obviously. The Sioux were not getting wealthy from oil, and it's really about protecting burial sites and water, but it's the same fundamental issue, which is tribal sovereign rights and protecting them, and we're still having that debate today. When I spoke to a former Osage chief, also not that long ago, there's some talk about trying to privatize reservations, and he just said, "I can't believe we're having this conversation in 2017."

  So going back to Faulkner again – it's like history is not even history, right? How much these murders still resonate so many generations later.
  Yes, so many Osage I met regularly go out and decorate the graves of the victims. And we really don't know how many Osage were murdered. I think you could say scores. It was a reign of terror. It had a genocidal quality.

  I follow you on Twitter, and you're on it all the time! How do you find the time to research and report this type of book?
  Well, my Twitter habits are diminishing. It's so funny, my Twitter habits were really big during parts of this book, where I think I was losing my mind. The book was just so much research and years living in a hovel that I think Twitter let me live in my mind.

  So you're dialing back on social media?
  Yeah, dialing back. Well, until I lose my mind again.

• Talk of the Nation - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124495782

  Deception And 'The Devil And Sherlock Holmes'

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  March 9, 20101:00 PM ET
  Heard on Talk of the Nation

  Enlarge this image
  Author David Grann has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003.
  Matt Richman
  David Grann spent years traveling around the world, documenting true stories of obsession, deception, and just plain mystery. He chronicles the stories he collected in his book, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.

  Grann's tales range from the suspicious death of an Arthur Conan Doyle scholar, Richard Lancelyn Green, to the story of an international impostor who somehow convinced an American family he was their missing son.

  Tell us: Have you ever deliberately misrepresented yourself, or just let someone believe something about you that wasn't quite the whole truth? Host Neal Conan admits he used to claim Conan Doyle as a distant relative. What's your story?

  NEAL CONAN, host:

  This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Washington.

  Sherlock Holmes once said that life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. Writer David Grann knows that. He spent years traveling around the world to investigate stories of obsession, deception and just plain mystery, and he most definitely includes those who quote Sherlock Holmes as if he'd been a real person.

  That's part of the title story in his new book, and while these tales range from the suspicious death of an Arthur Conan Doyle scholar to the vast network of tunnels beneath New York City, several open a window into the lengths some people go to to deceive others or themselves.

  Let's face it, we've all been tempted to embellish the truth about ourselves at some point or another, in large ways or small. I'll confess that many years ago I claimed Conan Doyle as a distant relative. He's the only Conan I'd ever heard of.

  When have you ever misrepresented yourself or maybe just let somebody believe something that wasn't quite the whole truth but made you look a little bit better? Tell us your story. Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

  Later in the program, valor thieves. Those who pretend to be war heroes deserve condemnation, but Jonathan Turley argues they should not be held to criminal charges.

  But first, David Grann joins us from our bureau in New York City. His new book is "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession." And welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION.

  Mr. DAVID GRANN (Author, "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession"): Oh, thanks so much for having me again.

  CONAN: And I wonder: Do you think that everybody, at least at some point in their lives, has made up something about themselves to make themselves look a little bit better?

  Mr. GRANN: I think that is certainly true. We all mythologize to some degree ourselves and probably embellish. I think some of that is the desire to tell stories. Some of the characters in this book, though, go to much greater lengths than the ordinary person.

  For example, there is a con man who was kind of one of the greatest con men. He was an imposter who always pretended to be a young person. Even when he was 33, he was doing this con to be taken in by orphanages and families.

  Or there was a case of somebody who had these kind of mytho-creations, this Polish novelist, and he may have planted clues to a real murder in his novel, and you never knew - and one of the things he was always trying to test was what is true and what is fictional, and can you tell the difference?

  CONAN: And what's a post-modernist and what's...

  Mr. GRANN: What's a post-modernist and what's an empiricist, exactly.

  CONAN: Well, let's get back to the character you call the Chameleon in your book, and this is man - you opened with a story of this 14-year-old waif found on the streets in a village in Paris. He says he's been terribly abused. The police have gotten a couple of calls. Come and rescue this young boy. He's troubled and he's wearing a cap because he said he's got terrible scars on his head. And of course they what a terrible story. They take him and take care of him.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, they take him in, they take care of him. He always does the same thing. At that point he was in his 30s. He was balding, so he wore a cap on his head and a bandana. He said he had been in a terrible car accident and had scars on his head, and that's why he wore this.

  He was brought into the school. He went to school with 13 and 14-year-old kids. He quickly became one of the most popular kids in school. They all loved him. The teachers all took an interest in him, and it was only gradually, when somebody actually saw a show about this great European imposter and his picture appeared, one of the teachers said, oh my God, I think thats our student, and slowly they came, and when they arrested him, you know, they took his cap off, and his voice suddenly dropped to a baritone, and he said I want a lawyer, and they knew then that he really was the Chameleon.

  CONAN: Yeah, busted. But the most amazing story about him is that he's in real trouble at one point, and so he invents a story that he finds a missing American kid who he vaguely resembled and claims to be this American kid who's been missing from his home in Texas for a couple of years.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, this is really what drew me to the story. It wasn't just that you had this eccentric imposter who did these kind of ruses all around Europe. But at a certain point he was in trouble in the law. He was in Spain. He was afraid he was going to be arrested.

  He had always invented characters. He had never stolen them, but at that point he steals the identity of a missing American boy, a boy who went missing when he was 13 named Nicholas Barclay(ph) from a very small town in Texas, very poor family.

  And the family comes, and they take him, and for five months he lives in Texas with the family at least saying and believing that he was their missing child, although the story then takes another twist.

  CONAN: A bizarre twist. Some family members apparently did believe he was the missing kid, but the mother and one of his quote-unquote "brothers" - well, we're left with the strong impression that they knew he was not the missing boy because they may have killed the missing boy.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, there is a growing suspicion on the part of the imposter, who's named Frederic Bourdain, this man who had always conned people - he began to wonder if he was the one who was being conned. and did the stepbrother in particular know about what had really happened to Nicholas and in fact been implicated in his murder, and that he in a way was an excuse, almost a protection, to ensure that people thought the brother was still alive.

  And when Frederic Bourdain, who was the imposter, was eventually arrested by the FBI, he tells them this story. Now, they of course cannot rely on anything he says.

  CONAN: Of course not.

  Mr. GRANN: This is a man who, by his very by his admission says my job is to manipulate, that is what I do. But they had their own suspicious about how could a family believe that this boy of a different color eyes who had only been missing for a few years, so...

  CONAN: Had a French accent.

  Mr. GRANN: Had a French accent - could be their missing son. And so they began to investigate it, and they developed very strong suspicions, they told me, the FBI agent told me and the prosecutor on the case strongly believed that the stepbrother either had knowledge or was involved in the disappearance of the boy, and the FBI agent alleged that the mother also, she thought, had some knowledge about what had happened to the boy.

  CONAN: And who was conning who? They had to believe his story because if they said no, we know he's not the kid because we anyway, anyway. And the kicker is that he's now married and has a child and is in telephone sales, where he replies: I'm a natural.

  Mr. GRANN: Yes, he's a very natural he's the best salesman. We wish we could all be such good salesmen as him. He says he's a natural, and he has when I wrote the story, he had one kid. He now has another kid, and when I asked him about this new role he had of he had always said when he did these cons, all he was looking for was love and a family. That was what he always said.

  Now he's suddenly constructed this in his life, and I said, you know, you've become a new person, and he said, no, this is who I am.

  CONAN: We're talking with David Grann about his book, "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes," and about the ability to deceive others and ourselves. What, well, fabrications have you ever made in your life story? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Ben's(ph) on the line calling from Hudson in Ohio.

  BEN (Caller): Hi. Should I tell you my story?

  CONAN: Go ahead.

  BEN: Okay. I was about 25 years old at the time, and I (technical difficulties)...

  CONAN: Oh, Ben, your phone is betraying you.

  BEN: Here, let me get over here. Is this any better?

  CONAN: Let's give it one more try.

  BEN: Okay. So when I was 25 years old I'm 54 now I had met this girl, and I really wanted to strike up a relationship with her. So I had to make up what I did for a living.

  Now, at the time I was in a management training program for a company in Florida and I was driving a cement truck, but I told her I was a lawyer.

  CONAN: Lawyers seem more glamorous.

  BEN: Well, and she fell for it, and during the weekend, of which I was home from Florida, back in Shaker Heights, Ohio, she invited me to this upscale party, which is fine. I went. But then it really got rough when I ran into some high school friends of mine who clearly knew I wasn't a lawyer.

  CONAN: And...

  BEN: So I managed for a little while, and the relationship lasted about a month and a half, and for a good month and a half I had a lot of good stories about law and where I went to school, until the relationship started getting serious, and then I had to...

  CONAN: Fess up, yeah. And did it dissolve at that point?

  BEN: We were talking every night for about two hours. After I told her truth, I don't think we talked for two minutes.

  CONAN: Well, I'm sorry about that, Ben, but a cautionary tale perhaps.

  (Soundbite of laughter)

  BEN: Yes.

  CONAN: Thank you very much. And have you ever told a whopper again?

  BEN: No, never.

  CONAN: Good, so you did learn a lesson. Thanks very much.

  BEN: Sure.

  CONAN: David Grann, there are so many people in your book, they do take it to extremes. The Polish writer, this is a guy who writes a, well, sort of modern-day version of "Crime and Punishment," but apparently having had committed the crime in the first place.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, I mean this is a kind of extraordinary story and I think very much fits this theme of that quote you said at the very beginning of the program, that Sherlock Holmes said that life is infinitely stranger than anything man could invent, and this story certainly fits those parameters.

  You had a Polish intellectual, a kind of highly regarded intellectual, who was a post-modernist, who wrote this very experimental novel, and at some point a detective is trying to solve a working class, very empirical, didn't really know what post-modernism was, he's trying to solve a cold case, and he gets a clue that points to the author, and he starts reading his novel.

  And as he's reading the novel, he begins to find what he believes are clues to an actual to the actual murder.

  CONAN: And he goes on and he finds actual physical evidence and eventually charges the author, who says wait a minute, I'm being put on trial for having written a book.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing, the funny - at least some of these stories have they can be very unsettling, sometimes disturbing, but they also have oddly comedic moments, and one of the most comedic moments is when this post-modern novelist is on trial and suddenly tries to claim that he is an empiricist and that others cannot interpret his novel. I know what the novel is.

  CONAN: I wrote it.

  Mr. GRANN: I wrote it, and he had always believed in this post-modern notion that the author is dead, and it's only interpretation that matters, and there is no truth. And suddenly, in the middle of his trial, he tries to proclaim that he is the author and he knows what he said.

  CONAN: And, but the creepiest part is apparently he'd been working on a sequel.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, it was very unsettling, that when he was arrested, and when I went to actually go visit him in a Polish prison, he told me that he was working on a sequel, and I then later learned and he told me it would be even more shocking than the original one.

  And then I found out that the police had gathered evidence from his computer where he was out gathering material about a new potential victim.

  CONAN: That's just one of the stories that David Grann tells in "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession." He published many of them originally in The New Yorker magazine, but they've been updated and revised.

  We're interested in stories of, well, your self-embellishment. Have you ever made yourself look a little bit better than perhaps reality would admit? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

  (Soundbite of music)

  CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Washington.

  We're talking about stories of deception in David Grann's new book, sure, but also closer to home. Who has not been tempted to embellish the truth about themselves at some point or another in large ways or small? When have you misrepresented yourself or maybe just let somebody believe something that wasn't quite the whole truth? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION.

  David Grann's new book is titled "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession," and let's get Norman on the line, Norman calling from Portland, Oregon.

  NORMAN (Caller): Yeah, hello, Neal?

  CONAN: Hi, Norman, go ahead.

  NORMAN: Yeah, nice talking to you. I was actually just about on my way out the door when I flipped on the radio and heard this conversation of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective novels, post-modern mendacity. I thought I'd take a shot to get through for the first time ever.

  CONAN: Well, congratulations.

  NORMAN: Thank you. If my voice sounds a little nervous, it's about -because I'm about to confess to something, and the short story is this. A few years ago, as an opera lover, I was in Rome, and I wanted well, I wasn't quite in Rome. I was on my way to Rome and I wanted to visit the three actual locations of the opera "Tosca."

  Now, I knew seeing the church and the Castel Sant'Angelo from Acts I and III would be easy, but I learned that the Palazzo Farnese is actually the French today, the French embassy, and not easy to access.

  So I wrote a letter to the French ambassador and told him I was a novelist researching an opera about "Tosca," and could I come and see the office and take some notes, under supervision of course. And to my surprise, they emailed me and told me yes, I could come, and I did, and in fact had a wonderful, private tour of the ambassador's private office.

  (Soundbite of laughter)

  NORMAN: And I had to continue with the charade as I was in conversation. End of the story: when I left and came back to the States, I felt so guilty about the clear lie more than an embellishment, that I sat down and wrote that novel.

  CONAN: You're kidding.

  NORMAN: It's not published, but it is finished, and one day maybe it'll see the light of day. If not, at least I have assuaged my conscience.

  (Soundbite of laughter)

  Mr. GRANN: Well, that was a very productive deception.

  CONAN: I was going to ask: What's the statute of limitations on invading the French embassy?

  NORMAN: I'm not sure what that is, and that was of some concern to me before I made the phone call. One last little piece of the story, as the emails there was more than one went back and forth, and I specifically asked for access to Baron Scarpia's office, the villain in "Tosca," the ambassador's secretary wrote back to me and said, well, they were willing to consider the request, but who was Baron Scarpia, and where is his office?

  So I, with my uncultured, American background, had to send off to them, with their pointy noses in the air, and explain to them who was Sardou and who was Puccini, and I kind of enjoyed having that opportunity to let the French know that just because I carry an American passport, I may know something.

  CONAN: Well, Puccini of course was Italian. If he'd been French, they would have known it.

  NORMAN: Sorry?

  CONAN: If Puccini had been French, they would've known it.

  NORMAN: Well, Sardou was French, the original one, and they didn't. So I felt justified in the little one-upmanship, so to speak. But the fact of the matter was it became a great memory, a funny story. I swear I probably haven't told it before this, and it did lead to the joy of writing this novel, such as it is.

  CONAN: Well, thank you, Norman, very much.

  NORMAN: Thank you, gentlemen, bye.

  CONAN: Interesting.

  Mr. GRANN: And one of the things I was going to inject, one of the things in the book, in the case of the chameleon, is we often think that these cons are very or these deceptions, these mytho-creations, are very hard to pass off, to get people to believe.

  But one of the things, especially in speaking to the chameleon, is you realize how easy these cons are. And often they seem extremely obvious in retrospect that we're actually quite vulnerable to this, and if people play on or pry on our certain vulnerabilities, we're easy to go along with them.

  CONAN: Yeah, that you look back at the people would look back at the way this 33-year-old man had fooled them into believing he was a 14-year-old boy, and you know, it seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, but you know, it's really hard to pick out at the time.

  Mr. GRANN: I worked with Stephen Glass at the New Republic years ago, who was this con man, pathological liar who made up all these fake stories. And you know, he would he conned me easily, and he kind of would play on my vulnerabilities, and then in retrospect I said: How could I not have known?

  CONAN: Let's get another caller in. This is Sonja(ph), Sonja with us from Tucson.

  SONJA (Caller): Hi, how are you?

  CONAN: Very well, thanks.

  SONJA: Well, my story is for my 10-year high school reunion, a girlfriend of mine whom I hadn't seen for many years had actually arrived about a half hour, 40 minutes before I did, and in the time between her arrival and mine, she had proceeded to tell everybody that I was a film producer in Hollywood.

  (Soundbite of laughter)

  SONJA: And the truth was I was only an assistant to a film producer in Hollywood, but once I got there, it was like, wow, that's the coolest job ever. How did you do that. I didn't have the heart or the guts to tell them that was not the case.

  CONAN: So your whole high school class thought you were working on "Titanic."

  SONJA: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. But I mean, I guess fortunately or unfortunately, the producer didn't have huge hits, but it was enough that if you actually looked it up, you would see, you know, that I worked with him, and it was very easy kind of to let the story go, so...

  CONAN: And an evening where you were the star graduate of your class.

  SONJA: I had the coolest job. That's definitely the true.

  CONAN: Well, that's probably worth a little a sleepless night or two.

  SONJA: Yes, definitely.

  CONAN: Sonja, thanks very much for the phone call, appreciate it. It is a reminder I thought about that other story before, but I was the London bureau chief for National Public Radio, and we had some colleagues going on a visit to the Soviet Union; this is obviously back in the day. And I, of course, the only person I was the London bureau chief, but I was the only person in the bureau, and we used to send telexes to negotiate their facilities and all this sort of stuff, to Moscow. And I kept promoting myself. I was eventually I was vice president European affairs.

  (Soundbite of laughter)

  CONAN: But this was just to get, you know, noticed by Soviet bureaucrats. It was not to get any benefit from it.

  Mr. GRANN: One of the characters' striking stories, I thought, in the book is this character of Forrest Tucker, who was this bank robber...

  CONAN: Not the actor, but...

  Mr. GRANN: Not the actor. He was kind of the last legendary stick-up man. He kind of started this back in the '30s and '40s and continued up, all the way up until a few years ago. When he was 78, he robbed his last bank. He and he sped away in a getaway car and was chased by the police.

  He was also the greatest prison escape artist of his generation, broke out of pretty much every prison, including San Quentin. He built a kayak and managed to flee. But the reason that made me think of him is that he would marry people and build a very normal family life, and the wife would believe that, you know, he was a musician.

  He had this fake office he would go to every day, and they believed they kind of lived this normal, middle-class life, and years would go by, and then eventually the FBI or the police would knock on their door because he had been arrested for robbing a bank, and they would discover that he had maintained this deception for years.

  CONAN: Even in the title story of your book, about the Sherlock Holmes expert who was murdered under suspicious circumstances, and you investigate the case, but even in that story there's a lot of double life going on here. It turns out there were things about him his family did not know in the end.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, and part of that story is really a meditation on biography and on sleuthing and can we ever know, fully know, another character. In this case the main character is trying to write a biography about Conan Doyle and learn everything he can...

  CONAN: My relative, yeah.

  Mr. GRANN: Yes, your relative, and write the definitive biography, and yet it's always elusive. He can never feel like he knows his character, uncover every secret. And similarly, in working this story, I found myself struggling to try to understand this Sherlock Holmes scholar who had perished and who he was and to kind of unravel and write his biography.

  And one of the things I discovered in meeting with his family, that even they didn't know some of his secrets. For example, he had been gay, and his lover, or one of his old lovers, came to his funeral, and they only learned that then. And there were other things as well about him, just ordinary things, that he had tried to write a novel, just small details about his travels overseas, that they were only discovering after he perished.

  CONAN: And one of the curiosities of that very curious story is that in fact if he'd been a little less obsessed and a little bit more patient, everything he ever wanted would've fallen into his hands.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, I mean, he had been striving to get this archive so he could write this biography, and he believed the archive had been stolen, and it turned out that it hadn't been, and many of these papers actually were made public, and he could've written this book had he just been more patient.

  And the story really explores this line between rationality and kind of super-reason, this kind of Sherlockian reason, and then rationality and madness, something you see in some of Sherlock Holmes' stories as well, with Moriarty, his, you know, his great enemy, and in many ways Richard Lancelon Green's life echoed that.

  CONAN: And indeed you see in the life of Conan Doyle too, who in his later years went, I think the official term is bonkers.

  Mr. GRANN: Yes, he went a little batty. Conan Doyle himself, he had been this person who, again, created the greatest rationalist character, this paragon of reason, this superhero of science in Sherlock Holmes.

  But by the end of his life, Conan Doyle, after World War I - and his son died in World War I - became obsessed with ghosts and sprites and believed he was visited by spirits and he said, I'm Sherlock Holmes. I've proven that this exists. And people essentially thought he had gone mad.

  CONAN: Let's hear from Jake(ph), Jake calling us from Minnetonka.

  JAKE (Caller): Hi. I wanted to say that I grew up in a home where my mother was a compulsive liar, so I learned very quickly that if you tell people things, they will believe you. They want to believe you. And using that - as a kid, I used that to my advantage. I was able to, you know, cheat, lie and steal and be able to look at everybody and say it wasn't me, I didn't do it.

  And it wasn't until I became an adult where the guilt got so bad where I can hear the lies coming out of my mouth before I say them. And I've had to isolate myself to the point where I don't want to take advantage of people, so I stay out of situations where people have to get to know me because I will make something up every single time.

  CONAN: Jake, have you talked to somebody about this? Did you get some help?

  JAKE: Well, I have. I don't know if I want to change it though. I mean, that's the kind of thing. I work in sales right now, and in the company I'm at, I'm the top salesperson so I get the biggest commission checks. It's like I know what I am. I know what my mom is. And I'm comfortable with it. My mom, I don't think she realizes she even does it.

  CONAN: Hmm. Jake, thank you very much for the phone call. Appreciate it.

  Again, getting back to the character, the chameleon. In the five months when he was pretending to be the American boy, stealing his identity, he goes crazy too.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, he does. I mean, he had always invented characters and kind of created them. He saw himself almost as an actor getting into a role, getting into a part. And suddenly, he was forced to play a real person. And there's one point where he starts going through the missing boy's items that had been given to him, his jacket and his letters. He's learning about the girlfriend that this missing boy had that he's supposed to be planning to be.

  And he would look at the mirror at himself and really became conscious of his deceptions and really became haunted by them and slowly really begins to unravel during that five-month period.

  CONAN: We're talking with David Grann about his new book, "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession."

  You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION coming to you from NPR News.

  And there's one story I wanted to finish up by talking with you about, and that is trial by fire. This is a look into a case in Texas where a man was executed for - after he was convicted of arson, burned down his house with his children inside. And in the trial, it seemed like an absolute slam dunk but it raises real questions about whether there is now actual proof that we have executed an innocent man.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I learned in doing these stories is often we think we know the truth or the truth seems totally logical. But unlike Sherlock Holmes, we're very fallible. We're very mortal, and we can't always see the pieces. And this is the most tragic case of that.

  A man named Cameron Todd Willingham woke up in his house, or said he woke up in a house that was on fire, and said he had run outside. His three daughters, they were very young - one years old and two - perished inside. He said he had fled outside and couldn't get to the children. And arson investigators came to the house and later found what they believe were clear signs and evidence of arson, including something they called crazed glass and low burning on the floor. And based largely on this evidence, he was convicted and he was ultimately executed in 2004.

  CONAN: And what happened was that toward the end of his incarceration, eventually, there was one woman who started to - just as a project - to reach out to him and eventually came to believe his story and got this evidence to a, you know, top-notch arson investigator, somebody who knew everything about it. And it turned out there were basic flaws with this scientific evidence.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah, more than basic flaws. They had found what they believed were 20 indicators of arson. And all the leading modern scientists, including the one who this woman had found, have concluded that these indicators were simply folklore. They weren't based on sound science.

  For example, this crazed glass I described. Arson investigators once believed that was caused from intense heat from someone pouring a liquid accelerant on the fire. In fact, it has nothing to do with a liquid accelerant. It's actually caused from thermal shock. When glass is hot and you shoot a fire hose at the glass, the sudden cooling is what causes that cracking. And so all these indicators turned out to be bunk or based on junk science or wives' tales.

  CONAN: I've watched "CSI." They've shown me the little V, the origin of the fire.

  Mr. GRANN: Yes. I mean, one of the things that they found in the house was a V pattern and that was usually said to believe where a fire had originated. Now, if you just take a toaster in a room and light it and there's nothing else, it will create a V. And at the lowest point, you could tell that's where the fire originated.

  But in a big fire, in a fire like at the Willingham house, which goes to something called flashover - I don't want to get too complicated, but essentially what it is is a room explodes with fire and even the floor ignites - you will get V patterns all over the place. And so this idea that because there were separate V patterns, there were different points of origin of the fire and, therefore, it had to been intentionally set, simply doesn't hold up under scientific scrutiny.

  CONAN: And it raises, of course, all sorts of questions. About the death penalty, you quote Justice Antonin Scalia saying if there was a documented case of an innocent man who had been executed, we wouldn't have to look it up. The name would be shouted from the rooftops.

  Mr. GRANN: Yeah. And I really do think this may become the first case where there is really overwhelming evidence that a factually innocent and a legally innocent person was executed. And if nothing else, it highlights great systemic failures in the judicial system that need to be corrected, especially when it comes to allowing in unreliable scientific testimony.

  CONAN: David Grann, thank you very much for your time today. We appreciate it.

  Mr. GRANN: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

  CONAN: David Grann is the author most recently of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness and Obsession. And he joined us today from our bureau in New York. We wanted to thank all the people who wrote in and called in to confess their exaggerations of their life story and the amplifications of their resume under various circumstances. We're sorry we couldn't get to all of them, but we do thank you for trying to join us on the program today.

  Coming up, well, not unrelated story: Should it be a felony to pretend to be a war hero, to falsely claim a Medal of Honor or a Purple Heart? Jonathan Turley will join us. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Killers of The Flower Moon
Priscilla Kipp
(May 2017): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

By David Grann

Doubleday

$28.95, 352 pages

ISBN 9780385534246

Audio, eBook available

AMERICAN HISTORY

According to the Osage American Indians, when May's full moon shines and the Earth warms, taller plants overtake April's tiny flowers, "stealing their light and water" until they die. This is bestselling author and journalist David Grann's fitting metaphor for what befell the Osages in Oklahoma, beginning in May 1921. His thoroughly researched account, Killers of the Flower Moon, is a chilling tale of unfettered greed, cruel prejudice and corrupted justice.

When the U.S. government drove the Osages from their territory in Kansas to northeastern Oklahoma, no one knew about the rich oil deposits below the surface of their new land. Soon the oil would make the Osages incredibly rich--and their white neighbors incredibly jealous.

Since only a tribe-enrolled Osage could claim the profits from their allotted lands, a law was conveniently passed requiring that guardians be appointed to "manage" the Osages' considerable wealth. The fraud and treachery that ensued, referred to as "Indian business" by anyone involved, deprived the Osage people of their money, property and even their lives. Families victimized by shootings, bombings and poisonings found no justice at the hands of corrupt lawmen, bankers and judges.

However, the travesties and tragedies unfolding in Oklahoma coincided with the rise of the ambitious J. Edgar Hoover and the new Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was the detective work of agent and former Texas Ranger Tom White that helped Hoover transform the formerly inept and ridiculed FBI into a powerful agency. The FBI was finally able to deliver a measure of justice to the Osages, albeit too late for many victims.

Grann's tale could have ended there and served its purpose well, revealing this "Reign of Terror" that was, until now, largely forgotten by most. But he goes on to reveal the many unresolved murders that preceded 1921 and the ongoing disenfranchisement of present-day Osages, adding to the sheer power of truth in Killers of the Flower Moon.

--Priscilla Kipp

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kipp, Priscilla. "Killers of The Flower Moon." BookPage, May 2017, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA492735155&it=r&asid=62657e2523b2726b4c6b8a054ff55a8c. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492735155

Killers of the Flower Moon
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

David Grann

#5 Hardcover Nonfiction

The author of The Lost City of Z returns with what our starred review called a "gripping true-crime narrative, which revisits a baffling and frightening--and relatively unknown-spree of murders occurring mostly in Oklahoma during the 1920s."

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Killers of the Flower Moon." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 13. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491575234&it=r&asid=fece2e5fe906779d228ccd753232e6f9. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575234

Killers of the flower moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
David Grann
60.3 (April-May 2017): p16.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 AARP
http://www.aarp.org/magazine/
This is a riveting true tale of greed and villainy by Grann, author of The Lost City ofZ. In the 1920s, Oklahoma's Osage Indians, made rich from oil found on their land in 1897, keep turning up dead--until the FBI steps in to investigate.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grann, David. "Killers of the flower moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI." AARP The Magazine, Apr.-May 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495720426&it=r&asid=8a6549c05ccafab30a7545409acb0fd4. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720426

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Annie Bostrom
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. By David Grann. Apr. 2017.352p. illus. Doubleday, $29.95 (9780385534246). 976.6004.

During the early 1920s, many members of the Osage Indian Nation were murdered, one by one. After being forced from several homelands, the Osage had settled in the late nineteenth century in an unoccupied area of Oklahoma, chosen precisely because it "rocky, sterile, and utterly unfit for cultivation." No white man would covet this land; Osage people would be happy. Then oil was soon discovered below the Osage territory, speedily attracting prospectors wielding staggering sums and turning many Osage into some of the richest people in the world. Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, 2010) centers this true-crime mystery on Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman who lost several family members as the death tally grew, and Tom White, the former Texas Ranger whom J. Edgar Hoover sent to solve the slippery, attention-grabbing case once and for all. A secondary tale of Hoover's single-minded rise to power as the director of what would become the FBI, his reshaping of the bureau's practices, and his goal to gain prestige for federal investigators provides invaluable historical context. Grann employs you-are-there narrative effects to set readers right in the action, and he relays the humanity, evil, and heroism of the people involved. His riveting reckoning of a devastating episode in American history deservedly captivates.--Annie Bostrom

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442469&it=r&asid=55061a6188ef32ecd409113616e44b87. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442469

Grann, David: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
(Feb. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Grann, David KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Doubleday (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 4, 18 ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death--by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing--began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Grann, David: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921686&it=r&asid=5304a2d08a8ef445936d25863b6fe7b4. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921686

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Deirdre Bray Root
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday. Apr. 2017.352p. photos, notes, bibliog. ISBN 9780385534246. $28.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385534253. CRIME

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the 1870s, the Osage Indians were herded onto a small tract of land in Oklahoma--land that unexpectedly held vast reserves of oil, rendering the tribe incredibly rich overnight. By law, the Osage had mineral rights outright, although they were still treated like children, requiring a white "guardian" to manage their assets. In 1921, there was a sudden upsurge in deaths of the Osage on the reservation--accidents, bad whiskey, and outright murder. Author Grann (The Lost City of Z) writes of these crimes, where at least 18 Osage and three nontribe members met suspicious deaths by 1925, many of them members of the same family. The Osage pleaded for the federal government to help, andj. Edgar Hoover, head of the fledgling FBI, sent agent Tom White to investigate. White discovered that many of the victims were connected to a single man, an upstanding community leader who stood to profit handsomely from the murders. The long, drawn out investigation finally resulted in convictions and good publicity for the agency, but some unanswered questions remain. VERDICT A spellbinding book about the largest serial murder investigation you've never heard of, which will be enjoyed by fans of the Old West as well as true crime aficionados. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]--Deirdre Bray Root, MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Root, Deirdre Bray. "Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301292&it=r&asid=db5316bdf8ad016e961081eb7f94322a. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301292

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

David Grann. Doubleday, $29.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-385-53424-6

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Grann (The Lost City ofZ), a New Yorker staff writer, burnishes his reputation as a brilliant storyteller in this gripping true-crime narrative, which revisits a baffling and frightening--and relatively unknown-spree of murders occurring mostly in Oklahoma during the 1920s. From 1921 to 1926, at least two dozen people were murdered by a killer or killers apparently targeting members of the Osage Indian Nation, who at the time were considered "the wealthiest people per capita in the world" thanks to the discovery of oil beneath their lands. The violent campaign of terror is believed to have begun with the 1921 disappearance of two Osage Indians, Charles Whitehorn and Anna Brown, and the discovery of their corpses soon afterwards, followed by many other murders in the next five years. The outcry over the killings led to the involvement in 1925 of an "obscure" branch of the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of Investigation, which eventually charged some surprising figures with the murders. Grann demonstrates how the Osage Murders inquiry helped Hoover to make the case for a "national, more professional, scientifically skilled" police force. Grann's own dogged detective work reveals another layer to the case that Hoover's men had never exposed. Agents: Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, Robbins Office. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616201&it=r&asid=e3bdb0bac6d25ba1b2593013ff1bd0af. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616201

Grann, David. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession
Stephen L. Hupp
135.5 (Mar. 15, 2010): p110.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Grann, David. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. Doubleday. Mar. 2010. c.352p. ISBN 978-0-385-51792-8. $26.95. COMM

Grann (staff writer, The New Yorker; The Lost City of Z) gathers together 12 of his magazine pieces, mainly from The New Yorker. His claim that they share overarching themes is a bit of a stretch. Yes, you can say they all relate to human obsessions to some extent, but the obsessions are so disparate, and with no real underlying theme enunciated by the author up front, that readers may come away puzzled if they wonder about the connections instead of enjoying the pieces separately. They can read about a man who dies under mysterious circumstances while pursuing a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's papers. They can learn about a researcher looking for giant squid, a man executed in Texas who may have been innocent, a bank robber who escaped from jail 19 times--and baseball player Ricky Henderson, who, despite age and diminishing skills, continued to play in the minor leagues well into his forties. VERDICT Grann writes these true stories in the readable fashion of a good journalist. As such, they're highly recommended to readers who enjoy a variety of accessible insights into human nature.--Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Lib., Parkersburg

Hupp, Stephen L.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hupp, Stephen L. "Grann, David. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2010, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA223225629&it=r&asid=6854f7970d3837dafb3351d88aa23688. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A223225629

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession
Connie Fletcher
106.12 (Feb. 15, 2010): p7.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession.

By David Grann.

Mar. 2010. 352p. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780385517928). 081.

The catchy title is misleading because this collection of 12 previously published articles by New Yorker staff writer Grann (who also wrote The Lost City of Z, 2009) has only one story that has anything to do with Holmes. Readers expecting true crime may also be disappointed because Grann's work here ranges from several actual crime cases through articles that have only a nod toward mystery, as in "Life Is Strange." However, Grann's in-depth reporting and vivid writing make this worthwhile reading for lovers of good journalism. The Holmes story, "Mysterious Circumstances," traces the fate of a foremost Holmes scholar, about to bid on a lost archive of Arthur Conan Doyle's, found garroted to death, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Another story, "The Chameleon," examines a master imposter's life. Perhaps the most gripping is "Which Way Did He Run?" in which the only firefighter of Engine Company 40 to survive the World Trade Center bombing, an amnesia victim, tries to piece together whether he acted as a hero or as a coward.--Connie Fletcher

Fletcher, Connie

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fletcher, Connie. "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA219830670&it=r&asid=7561c62030f4ccd5e9f4f0c453696744. Accessed 25 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A219830670

Kipp, Priscilla. "Killers of The Flower Moon." BookPage, May 2017, p. 25. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA492735155&asid=62657e2523b2726b4c6b8a054ff55a8c. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Killers of the Flower Moon." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 13. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491575234&asid=fece2e5fe906779d228ccd753232e6f9. Accessed 25 July 2017. Grann, David. "Killers of the flower moon: the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI." AARP The Magazine, Apr.-May 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA495720426&asid=8a6549c05ccafab30a7545409acb0fd4. Accessed 25 July 2017. Bostrom, Annie. "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA485442469&asid=55061a6188ef32ecd409113616e44b87. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Grann, David: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480921686&asid=5304a2d08a8ef445936d25863b6fe7b4. Accessed 25 July 2017. Root, Deirdre Bray. "Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 92+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA479301292&asid=db5316bdf8ad016e961081eb7f94322a. Accessed 25 July 2017. "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 69. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA466616201&asid=e3bdb0bac6d25ba1b2593013ff1bd0af. Accessed 25 July 2017. Hupp, Stephen L. "Grann, David. The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2010, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA223225629&asid=6854f7970d3837dafb3351d88aa23688. Accessed 25 July 2017. Fletcher, Connie. "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2010, p. 7. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA219830670&asid=7561c62030f4ccd5e9f4f0c453696744. Accessed 25 July 2017.

• Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/review-david-granns-killers-of-the-flower-moon-is-a-gripping-tale-masterfully-told/article34967276/
  Word count: 872

  Review: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a gripping tale, masterfully told
  DEAN JOBB
  Special to The Globe and Mail
  Published Friday, May 12, 2017 9:45AM EDT
  Last updated Friday, May 12, 2017 9:45AM EDT

  Some were shot execution-style. Others were dispatched with poisoned bootlegged whisky. One couple died when a bomb blew their home to pieces.

  Between 1921 and 1925, two dozen members of the Osage tribe in oil-rich northern Oklahoma were murdered. A newsreel that flickered in movie houses across the United States at the time called it “the most baffling series of murders in the annals of crime.” Band members still refer to this dark chapter in their history as the “Reign of Terror.”

  “Like most Americans,” admits David Grann, a staff writer with The New Yorker, “when I was in school, I never read about the murders in any books; it was as if these crimes had been excised from history.”

  In Killers of the Flower Moon, Grann meticulously excavates the lost history of the Osage and the oil boom that made them rich – and, in turn, made them targets. After being driven from their ancestral territory like so many other Native Americans, a few thousand Osage retreated to a tract that seemed too barren to be of interest to rapacious white settlers.

  Everything changed during the First World War, when vast oil reserves were discovered under their land. Leases and royalties made band members incredibly wealthy, able to build fine homes and hire white servants. Envious journalists, betraying the bigotry of the times, wrote of the conspicuous consumption of the “red millionaires” and “rich redskins.” Rather than change a flat tire, according to one story, an Osage would simply buy a new car.

  Money poured in. Tribe members received a total of $30-million (U.S) in 1923 alone (about $400-million in today’s terms). White businessmen and outlaws rushed in as well, eager to cash in on the oil boom. Many Osage were not deemed competent to spend their own money, prompting the federal government to appoint prominent white citizens to control their finances as legal guardians – an invitation to theft and fraud that many guardians were unable to pass up.

  Then the killings began. Mollie Burkhart, an Osage married to a white man, lost her sister (shot to death), mother (poisoned) and another sister (killed in the house explosion), and barely survived a scheme to poison her insulin injections. The death toll mounted. “The world’s richest people per capita,” Grann writes, “were becoming the world’s most murdered.” Local justice officials and private detectives investigated, but proved inept or corrupt.

  Enter Tom White, a former Texas Ranger. “An old-style lawman” with “the eerie composure of a gunslinger,” as Grann describes him, “he seemed to have sprung from a mythic age.” He was blessed with a strong moral compass and an uncanny ability to read people. “He talked like he looked and shot,” a colleague recalled, “right on target.”

  White was overseeing a field office of the federal Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation – the predecessor of the FBI – when J. Edgar Hoover tapped him in 1925 to crack the Osage murders. Hoover, who was more interested in empire-building than justice, hoped the case would burnish the fledgling bureau’s reputation.

  With the trail cold, White and a team of undercover agents waded into a sea of rumour, lies and false clues. Grann meticulously recreates the investigation, replete with setbacks and stunning breakthroughs, that identified one of the area’s leading citizens as the kingpin behind a conspiracy to kill Osage and seize their share of the oil revenue.

  Two men were convicted and imprisoned for one of the murders, and strong evidence linked them to several other killings. This was good enough for Hoover. Case closed.

  But not for Grann. His last book, The Lost City of Z (the movie version has just hit theatres) is a story of obsession – British explorer Percy Fawcett’s quest a century ago to find the ruins of a fabled civilization in remote western Brazil, and the author’s determination to trace his subject’s journey deep into the Amazon jungle.

  This time, Grann was obsessed with finding any cold-case evidence that could still be gleaned from yellowing documents and fading memories. After years of digging into archival records and interviewing descendants of some of those killed, he reached a startling conclusion: Many more Osage, perhaps hundreds, died in a murderous spree that began before 1921 and continued into the Depression era. He even amassed enough evidence to identify one killer who was never prosecuted.

  Killers of the Flower Moon is a gripping tale, masterfully told. When murderers escape justice, Grann notes, “history can often provide at least some final accounting.” While it’s too late to identify, let alone punish, all those who preyed on the Osage, this book ensures these brutal crimes will never again be forgotten.

  Dean Jobb’s latest book, Empire of Deception, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction.

• London Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/01/killers-of-the-flower-moon-david-grann-review
  Word count: 1163

  Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann – review
  A shocking episode of US history is recounted in this story of Native Americans murdered for their oil wealth

  Ed Vulliamy
  Monday 1 May 2017 07.30 BST

  Sometimes Cormac McCarthy writes a great American novel; every so often the Coen brothers make a great American film – and in the best traditions of American journalism, someone comes up with a story that cuts to a kernel of the national narrative; here is one of those.

  The timing of David Grann’s historical investigation into the systematic murder of Osage Native Americans in Oklahoma during the first quarter of the 20th century could not be more cogent. In the time it took to write his own signature, President Donald Trump in January negated months of protest, and a rare victory, by the Standing Rock Lakota nation in stopping a gas pipeline through sacred lands and a reservoir crucial to the tribe’s water supply. Trump overturned a moratorium on the pipeline, which now proceeds regardless of the Native nation’s ancestral rights and traditions, wellbeing and sensibilities.

  Grann’s story is an ancestor to this tragedy: about how the cynical greed of the initial oil rush, and quick money it promised, led to a sinister – but also singular — persecution and mass murder of the Osage.

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  We are horribly accustomed to histories of the obliteration of culturally and spiritually rich Native nations who have little care for monetary wealth, and the entrapment of the survivors on barren “reservations”. This, however, is the story of a nation, the Osage, driven on to what the white man thought was another patch of dust; but beneath which, it emerged, lay one of the richest oilfields in America. The Osage had an inkling of this, and were wise enough, in their treaty of subjugation, to retain rights to whatever lay below the ground ceded to white man’s law.

  The deception and destruction of those people was multilayered. It began with the imposition of the “allotment” system, which crushed the collectivity of Native land ownership. When oil was struck, a system was devised whereby the Native owners of the headrights would lease them to “guardians”, who then set about what became known as “the Indian business” of appropriating the Osage’s rightful wealth.

  Some Osage did make millions from their oil headrights, and even though measures were imposed to stop them spending it freely, this wealth was one thing the whites could not abide.

  Though Grann does not write like a McCarthy or a McMurtry, you forget sometimes that this is not fiction in their vein
  But Grann’s book is not about generalities; it is principally about one matriarchal Osage family, and the devilish plot to murder its womenfolk one by one, in a coldly calculated order, as would gradually bequeath their riches to white speculators in the end by the only viable means: inheritance. And here lies the macabre intimacy that marks this out from other stories of mass killing of American Indians: inheritance, of course, entailed marrying Native women, raising children with them while knowing the plan’s murderous outcome.

  Mollie Burkhart was among the Osage who rode in the back of a big car (while retaining tribal customs and dress) after oil was found under her parcel of land. Married to an apparently loving white man, she saw her mother, Lizzie, wither away, poisoned; her sister Anne shot; another sister, Rita, blown up; and was herself injected by two doctors, brothers charged with her care – not with insulin, but poison. She recovered only when away from their “treatment”.

  Mollie thought her white husband, Ernest, to be her champion, as she set out to unravel the cruel mysteries. And even more so his reputable uncle, William Hale, who presented himself as ally and father figure to the beleaguered, hated Osage – a pillar of decency and law in a lawless land. But Mollie ends up sitting alone in the public gallery of a courtroom, watching the man she married, father of her children, finally testify in the trial of Hale – mastermind of the entire grisly plot – that he had himself been part of it all the while, scheming the deaths of all Mollie’s family, and finally her own, to inherit all they had.

  And here a second theme emerges, a twist. With local “law enforcement” entirely in the hands of a corrupt oligarchy, whose purpose was to break the law, the killing of the Osage became the first major murder investigation, and cause celebre, of the FBI, and its ambitious new director, J Edgar Hoover.

  The western idea of private property is flawed. Indigenous peoples have it right
  Julian Brave NoiseCat
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  The book’s second lead character is Tom White, an investigator in a noble tradition, whose interests happened to coincide with Hoover’s weird opportunism. White cracks the case, using guile, new forensic methods and exploitation of the fears and grudges of the very crooks Hale had used, now turned against him.

  Though Grann does not write like a Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry, one can forget sometimes that this is historical investigation, and not fiction in their vein. Then turn the page, and there are photographs of the characters about whom we are reading, from the archive, in real life.

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  Grann writes a moving coda, whereby he advances White’s work from the papers, solving the murders of anyone closing in on the truth around the Hale/Burkhart crimes, but also of other Osage – unconnected to Mollie’s family, therefore establishing that his is not a singular tale but one of “countless other killings” of similar kind. Then, to join the final dots between past and present, Grann relates a meeting with – and publishes a picture of – Mollie’s granddaughter Margie. He also finds the descendant of another murder victim called Vaughan: “chasing history, even as it was slipping away”, he writes, for this lady dies shortly after Grann meets her and relates the horror he has found.

  The genocide by white America against Native nations during the century leading up to Grann’s period is a metaphor for humanity’s decimation of the natural world which the Natives saw as sacred. If President Trump’s running roughshod over the Standing Rock Lakota is an echo of that initial devastation, so Grann’s book is a timely and disturbing chapter in the original, terrible atrocity.

  • Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• Time
  http://time.com/4737945/killers-flower-moon-david-grann-review/
  Word count: 261

  David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon Is Unsurprisingly Extraordinary
  Claire Howorth
  Apr 13, 2017
  IDEASClaire Howorth is an assistant managing editor at TIME
  Nearly 100 years ago, the Osage tribe of Oklahoma were thought to be the wealthiest people per capita in the world, thanks to their oil-rich reservation, kindly sold back to them by the federal government that had snatched it away. The hundreds of millions of dollars that spewed from those wells funded lavish mansions, chauffeured cars and couture wardrobes for the Osage.
  They'd have been richer still — perhaps not striving at a 20% poverty rate today — were it not for the parasitic Getty dynasty and others. Or for the fact that the Osage began to be systemically murdered, a crime David Grann examines in his unsurprisingly extraordinary new book, Killers of the Flower Moon.
  What at first seemed to be coincidental killings came to fit a pattern of conspiracy. As the body count ticked higher and the few white men trying to help the tribe became victims, the crisis catalyzed the formation of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover isn't a hero here, though — he put enormous pressure on the fragile, politically explosive case, which he entrusted to a band of unorthodox but talented agents.Grann has an eye for cinematic tales and the film rights to Flower Moon have already sold for an astronomical $5 million. But the end of Flower Moon leaves the reader with a sense of injustice not truly avenged, and it's no fault of the author — it's American history.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/6343-david-grann-devil-sherlock-holmes#.WXcpYYiGNPY
  Word count: 391

  March 2010

  THE DEVIL AND SHERLOCK HOLMES
  Tales worthy of the great detective
  BookPage review by Edward Morris
  Sherlock Holmes knew two things to be true: that noticing small, seemingly inconsequential details can lead one to larger discoveries, and that real life spawns situations more curious than mere fiction can. These concepts are the thematic backbone of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann’s collection of 12 previously published articles concerning the weird and the wonderful in human conduct. In each case, Grann brings a reporter’s eye and investigative tenacity to his subject. He is, in essence, both the probing Holmes and his dutiful note-taker, Dr. Watson.

  Suitably enough, in his opening chapter, Grann takes the reader into the rarefied world of Sherlock Holmes scholars and enthusiasts who treat Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imaginary detective as if he had actually existed. Perhaps the most brilliant of these was Richard Lancelyn Green. Fascinated by the figure of Holmes since childhood, Green became an acknowledged expert on Doyle’s life and methods. He was trying desperately to prevent a treasury of Doyle’s papers from being auctioned off when, on the morning of March 27, 2004, police broke through the locked door of his London residence and “found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.” Murder or an elaborate suicide?

  Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Lost City of Z, also chronicles another mysterious death in Poland and a novel that seems to bear on it. He examines the detective work that led to the prosecution of a man in Texas for killing his children in a house fire, comes face to face with leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and hangs out with a purported Haitian torturer. Then there are his tales of obsession—the adult Frenchman who repeatedly passed himself off as a child; the relentless searchers for giant squids; and the generations of “sand hogs” who keep New York’s water flowing.

  The author’s dramatic pacing and attention to colorful details would make Dr. Watson proud. No doubt the persnickety Holmes would approve, too.

  Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

• Oregonian
  http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/04/nonfiction_review_the_devil_an.html
  Word count: 476

  Nonfiction review: 'The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession'

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  on April 17, 2010 at 11:00 AM

  "Everyone says I'm smart," Forrest Tucker acknowledged, after his arrest for robbing the Republic Security Bank in Jupiter, Fla. "But I'm not smart in the ways of life or I wouldn't have done the things I did."
  Seventy-eight-years-old, and looking "as if he had just come from the Early Bird Special," Tucker had been one of the most notorious stickup men -- and escape artists -- of the 20th century. When he died, he sighed, no one would remember him. Sitting in a wheelchair in a prison medical center in Fort Worth, Texas, Tucker wished that he had had "a real profession, something like the music business."

  David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is drawn to men like Tucker, who exhibit human nature in all its power and perversity. In "The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession," he profiles a dozen of them, including Richard Lancelyn Green, the world's foremost -- and most obsessive -- expert on Sherlock Holmes, who died, mysteriously, while in hot pursuit of the missing papers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Parisian-born Frederic Pierre Bourdin, who assumed the identity of Nicholas Barclay, a missing 16-year-old boy from Texas; and Krystian Bala, a Polish intellectual whose novel, "Amok," a postmodern rendition of "Crime and Punishment," was a "road map" to a murder he himself had committed.

  A gifted storyteller, Grann has a Sherlock Holmesian gift for unearthing facts that are hidden in plain sight, presenting a crystal-clear narrative and letting his compelling cast of characters speak for themselves. With good reason, he doesn't try too hard to explain the inexplicable by supplying answers to enduring age-old questions about why some people do good while others are evil. Recognizing his remorse for what it was, a show, he tells us, Bourdin married and had a child after he was released from prison. Had he become a new person? After a moment of silence, the chameleon replies, enigmatically, "No, this is who I am."

  Easily worth the price of admission, a visit to Grann's rogue's gallery is likely to leave you with a sense, at once awful and awesome, of the profound desire we all have for recognition. Caught, convicted and imprisoned, Bala announces that a new edition of "Amok" is about to be released. And that he is hard at work on a new -- and "even more shocking" -- novel, titled "De Liryk," a pun on lyrics, as in a story, and delirium. When it's published, he implies, "the devil" will get his due.

  -- Glenn C. Altschuler

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