An explosive device planted at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair launched the career of the Mad Bomber, who would periodically rattle the city through the mid-1950s—with an announced hiatus for the duration of World War II in demonstration of his patriotism! Cannell’s distinguished work of true-crime writing recounts not only the bombings, their investigation, solution, and aftermath, but also the history of anarchist terrorism in the 20th century, American police work, and the ascendency and decline of newspaper journalism. It also serves as a dual biography of the bomber, not an anarchist but a disabled former Consolidated Edison employee who had a valid though inappropriately expressed grievance against the company, and the Freudian psychiatrist who through analyzing clues in the bomber’s letters to the press drew a portrait that proved to be remarkably accurate.
As science fiction sometimes anticipates the future, in this case so did detective fiction. As Cannell points out, Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes practiced the same sort of deductive reasoning Dr. James A. Brussel applied to the bomber and later to the Boston Strangler. “In 1956, there was no such thing as criminal profiling; nobody could recall an instance when the police had consulted a psychiatrist. It was a collaboration fabricated in detective novels, but never found in real life.” Brussel admitted in later writings that while he always started “with a solid basis of science...somewhere along the way intuition and imagination begin to take over.” The chapter in which Brussel reveals his profile of the bomber is extremely Sherlockian in feel. And Cannell notes, “Like Sherlock Holmes, he played the odds.”
I initially reviewed Incendiary from the audiobook, which, though effectively read by Peter Berkrot, demonstrates the limitations of the audio format for works of historical nonfiction. The print edition has eight pages of illustrations (most memorably a couple shots of the amiable, respectable-looking, and unthreatening bomber at the time of his arrest), and 19 pages of source notes.
