Over the course of his career, David Grann has spent extensive time with killers, confidence men, spies, hustlers, informants, frauds, poets and politicians. He’s trekked the Amazon in search of lost cities and sailed the Pacific hunting giant squid. Once, in Poland, he asked a very prim local to spot-translate a smutty novel so that he could interrogate the author, a suspected murderer, about its incriminating content. He is, in short, a seasoned sleuth, well versed in all manner of tradecraft.
Fifteen minutes before the time we’d agreed, I walked into a café in New York’s Flatiron District, chose a seat and was beginning to unload my things when it occurred to me that I was being astutely watched by a man in a brown corduroy jacket. He was at the front corner table, his back to a curtained wall and his elbow on a banquette: the ideal position for a private chat. It was David Grann, looking wholly in his element. Very few people, I expect, ever manage to get ahead of him on a story.
For the last 14 years, Grann has been a staff writer for The New Yorker. His tales of homicidal novelists, ruinous expeditions, and political chicanery have earned him a dedicated following and a reputation for the kind of dogged reporting that penetrates a story’s apparent intrigue and reaches somewhere far more mysterious. Mention Grann’s name to a friend and the odds are you’ll spend the next hour or so recounting the various twists and turns of your favorite articles—“A Murder Foretold,” in which Grann investigates the strange assassination of Rodrigo Rosenberg; “Trial by Fire,” on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, or The Lost City of Z, Grann’s Amazonian quest to find the remains of Col. Percy Fawcett, the British explorer. That last story, already Grann’s most famous, is about to earn a new spotlight, as the movie adaptation, written and directed by James Gray and starring Charlie Hunnam (as Col. Fawcett, sadly, not Grann), hits theaters this week.
In a moment when pop culture is obsessed with true crime and consumes shows, podcasts and documentaries as fast as they can be produced, Grann’s work stands out as the product of rigorous investigation and a supremely discerning eye. Many, many crime stories come his way, but he delves into only a few and writes about even fewer. So what’s he looking for? What’s the key to nuanced true crime? That was the question I put to him as we settled into the table he’d staked out for us.
“It’s not about the sensational,” he said. “I’m not just looking for blood or bodies or a transgression.” What then? He stirred his coffee before answering: “Moral import.”
When he first heard the story of the Osage Indian Murders, the moral import was immediately evident. It wasn’t just an unsolved crime spanning generations. It also posed a fundamental question. As Grann frames it for me now: “Are we a country of laws?” His new book, Killers of the Flower Moon, is about the search for an answer.
A hundred years ago, the Osage Indians were among the richest nations in the world. The stretch of Indian Territory (now in Oklahoma) where they had been forced to resettle in the 19th century turned out to contain vast oil reserves. The tribe held the mineral rights collectively, and each individual on the Osage rolls was granted a “headright”—a percentage on the royalties, which could be passed down to heirs. The tribe was a target for all manner of thieves and hustlers: by law, a “guardianship” system was in place, whereby each Osage was assigned a white businessman to control his or her money. Exploitation, embezzlement and fraud were rampant. “It was called the Indian business,” Grann tells me. “It was a criminal enterprise.” Soon, that criminal enterprise took a violent turn. One-by-one the Osage were being murdered. A gunshot to the back of the head. Poisoned drinks. A bomb planted beneath a home under cover of night. Years passed and the death toll rose steadily into the dozens.
“It’s not about the sensational. I’m not just looking for blood or bodies or a transgression.”“I never knew about this, never learned about it in school,” Grann says. “This wasn’t 300 years ago. This was the 1920s. A modern era.” He first heard the story in passing, from a historian, in 2011. He began looking into the case and was shocked at the scale and cravenness of the crimes. He calls it “a story about complicity, people who committed murder and people who helped commit it. There were willing executioners and there were those who remained silent and got rich.”
The official story is that the killings, known to the Osage as the “Reign of Terror”—began in 1921 and ended in 1926. The crimes were largely attributed to one man, a local rancher and strongman engaged in a scheme to kill off the Osage in order to gain control of their headrights. It was a conclusion most were willing to accept.
As Gran sees it, the story of the Osage Indian Murders is also the story of the FBI. In 1925, when the Bureau of Investigation first took over the case from an unholy alliance of corrupt local law enforcement and Pinkerton men, the bureau’s head, a young J. Edgar Hoover, was in need of good publicity. Investigators were under pressure to deliver a victory that could be celebrated in the bureau’s film and radio propaganda. “It was one of those cases,” Grann tells me, “that reminds you just how important it is for the FBI not to become politicized.” The agents went after suspects who could be convicted. Disparate leads were ignored. A tidy conviction was the goal. Once their man was in prison, the only thing left was to trumpet the success. But among the Osage, rumors persisted—more deaths, more “guardians” implicated. Many survivors and descendants felt the “Reign of Terror” was never truly resolved.
Almost a hundred years later, Grann began his investigation. For the first year, he says, he wrote letter after letter to everyone he could think of—sheriff departments, prison wardens, government archivists, survivors, historians. As documents started to come in, his office in New York became “a grim repository.” He went to Oklahoma to meet with members of the Osage Nation and to hear the family lore. He spent more hours than he can now recall combing through financial records and case files.
Working on a crime story, Grann tells me, is like being a detective. “The world is chaotic and you’re trying to give it a sense of order.” At first, he thought the mystery was a “whodunit.” But the more he uncovered, he realized it was a question of “who didn’t do it?” The atrocities and the cover-up that followed were more extensive than anyone had known. “I’ve spent most of my life demolishing conspiracies,” Grann says now. “Usually you have a lot of loosely connected facts and it turns out that coincidences are just that. But this time was different. It was a real conspiracy.”
And what about the other detectives? The ones working for the government?
“The people handling this case,” Grann says, “they formulated the kind of narrative we like in our crime stories. There’s a singular, cancerous force in society, and if we’re able to remove that force, things return back to normal. It’s a comforting notion. But this time, it blinded the agents to what was, truly, a systemic corruption.”
We’re sitting in a café in downtown Manhattan, far away from Oklahoma and the Osage Nation, nearly a hundred years past the start of the murders and more than five years on since Grann began his research, but it’s clear the case is with him still. He acknowledges as much. “Most of the time, when you’re writing about history,” he says, hesitating before he continues, “you’re dealing with the horror of what you know. But then sometimes it’s the horror of what you don’t know that haunts you.”
That distinction, it seems to me, is the mark of Grann’s very best work.
In crime fiction, there’s often said to be two types of story: the whodunit, in which a mystery is solved and order is restored; and the noir, in which one mystery begets another and the detective is compelled to wade deeper and deeper into the morass. Grann’s non-fiction straddles both sides of the divide. In “A Murder Foretold,” for example, the story of Rodrigo Rosenberg’s death, it’s one thing to learn who is likely responsible for killing a prominent businessman and his daughter; it’s quite another to contemplate the last moments, the motivations of a man taking out a contract on his own life. Grann’s authorial presence in these stories is on the margins, but significant: we feel confident he’s turned over every stone, asked every question, and chased every lead, which makes it all the more chilling when an answer remains elusive. He serves as both kinds of detective—the solver of mysteries and the man in the morass.
I mention all this to Grann by way of asking about The Lost City of Z, his last book-length work before Killers of the Flower Moon, and now “a major motion picture.” In 1925, the explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared in the Amazon. Eight decades later, Grann went looking for him. Grann, along with his expedition colleagues, was by no means the first to search for Fawcett. Many had been seduced by the legend of a forgotten civilization and by Fawcett’s heroic legacy. Those seekers were either taken captive by natives or defeated by the jungle itself. Grann went further than anyone else toward solving the mystery of what happened to Fawcett and his “City of Z.” But a great deal of the book’s magic lies in what we still don’t know for sure. A film version of Fawcett’s final expedition, however well made, threatens to trample some of that magic. Or anyway that was my concern, so I ask Grann about the experience of seeing one of his mysteries unfold on the big screen for the first time.
The first time, he tells me, was “totally weird.” As it turns out, he first saw the film in a private screening room with his wife. They were the only two people there, so they talked throughout. “We just sat there and kept pointing at the screen and saying, ‘oh look what they did,’ or ‘oh wow, there’s Fawcett.’ We were watching it as a process. The second time, I saw it at the New York Film Festival, and there I got to take it in as a piece of art.” And what was that like? Unnerving? “It was wonderful,” Grann says. “You see James Gray’s craft and the actors’ interpreting all these events and people. You experience it as a movie. As an author you have to be realistic about these things. My contribution is the book. The movie is its own thing. It’s gratifying, because something you worked on will reach a wider audience, and every writer, no matter what they say, wants that. And in some ways the movie makes what I do possible, because this kind of work—these investigations, they take so much time.”
My final question is about those investigations, whether there’s any risk that as Grann’s projects become better know, and coveted by Hollywood, the work itself could be compromised—will it be harder to show up in, say, an isolated community in Oklahoma and ask people to unload their stories? Have the expectations changed?
Grann laughs and shakes his head. “Nobody gives a shit about you. They care about what happened and why. That’s important to remember when you’re doing this work. Your job is just to focus on the story—let it take you wherever it needs to go.”
