I am certainly not the only person drawn to disasters—at least those of the fictional sort. Placing some natural or human-caused calamity at the crux of a story, or incorporating the threat of widespread devastation into a broader plot can heighten its suspense and drama, and significantly raise the outcome stakes for its characters. It’s hard to pull one’s attention away from the spectacle of imminent catastrophe.
For that reason, Hollywood filmmakers have given us such pulse-quickening epics as Airport (1970, in which a suicide bomber threatens to take down a Boeing passenger jet), The Poseidon Adventure (1972, about a luxury ocean liner capsizing in the North Atlantic), The Towering Inferno (1974, centered on a burning San Francisco skyscraper), and Avalanche (1978, set at a snow-endangered ski resort). Meanwhile, authors have delivered anxiety-ridden tales on the order of Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson’s The Prometheus Crisis (1975, focused on a nuclear plant meltdown), Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island (2003, featuring a tropical cyclone), and Ben E. Winters’ The Last Policeman (2012, which imagines a civilization-destroying asteroid barreling toward Earth).
Disasters are already rampant in human history, and thanks to escalating terrorism, recurrent mass shootings, and myriad threats posed by global warming—wildfires, rising sea levels, disrupted food supplies, pandemics, etc.—the world seems unlikely to become safer or more secure at any time soon. This may actually be good news for storytellers, including those working the crime and thriller side of the tracks, who can continue to capitalize on reader attraction to nightmarish events.
Most of the large-scale hardships this genre serves up are dramatic fabrications, or are rooted only partially in reality. Yet a number of books—including those mentioned below—have combined bona fide historical tragedies with invented misdeeds and mysteries, the disasters often complicating the detection. The works here are divided according to types of crises, and arranged in order of their period settings.
___________________________________
PLAGUE
___________________________________
A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Susanna Gregory (1998)
The “plague” of this book’s title is the so-called Black Death, a horrific epidemic of bubonic plague that killed 25 million people or more across Europe during the mid-14th century. Gregory (a pseudonym used by UK academic Elizabeth Cruwys) bases her story in Cambridge in 1348, near the outset of the pestilence’s race through England. There we find physician and forensic sleuth Matthew Bartholomew trying to determine who is decimating the population of scholars at Michaelhouse College (today part of Trinity College). First to go, in gory and scandalous fashion, is the school’s master, Sir John Babington. Dr. Bartholomew is saddened by the loss of his friend, Sir John, who had just shared with him plans for the college’s growth. But when it’s followed by additional slayings, an attack on Bartholomew himself, and the unlikely disappearance of a madman’s corpse, the doctor’s dolor gives way to curiosity. And not even stern instructions from the local parish bishop to cover up these mysterious fatalities (“You will hang for treason if you do not comply!”) can stop Bartholomew from embarking on his own investigation. Before long, he’s tangled in a complicated story that features rioting, pervasive deception, and distrust even of his own family, as well as what may be a sinister inter-university conspiracy to undermine Cambridge’s reputation—all while the Black Plague sweeps its malevolent hand over the land.
___________________________________
FIRE
___________________________________
The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor (2017)
Over five days in early September 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed England’s capital, gutting its medieval core and pushing tens of thousands of people out onto the streets. Amazingly, only a handful of residents were recorded as having been killed during that conflagration. In Taylor’s tale, one of the men watching flames consume St. Paul’s Cathedral is James Marwood, a beleaguered junior government clerk and the son of a republican who lost everything when Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth crumbled and Charles II restored the monarchy in 1660. Spotting a boy too close to the blaze, Marwood tries to pull him away—realizing only too late that “he” is in fact a quick-tempered teenage girl, who bites him on the hand for his trouble and then filches his cloak. It turns out, that hellion is Catherine “Cat” Lovett, the daughter of a once-powerful religious extremist, who dreams of becoming an architect and escaping an arranged marriage. What links these two protagonists is not simply their families’ inimical relationships with the English throne, but the discovery, in the rubble of St. Paul’s, of a dead man—stabbed and left with his thumbs laced together. Marwood is presently dragooned into investigating this homicide, as well as later atrocities, while political turmoil threatens to devastate the city as surely as any inferno. Taylor shows an assiduous researcher’s touch in re-creating ruined London, though his skill at making us care about two lead players damaged and adrift among forces beyond their control may be yet more estimable.
Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon by Larry Millett (1996)
Even Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detectives aren’t safe from disaster. The first of Millett’s Holmes novels (and predecessor to his better-remembered Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders, 1998), Red Demon removes Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson from their customary British digs and drops them, instead, into Minnesota in 1894. There, they search for a homicidal arsonist who’s been plaguing James J. Hill’s mighty Great Northern Railway. Millett makes estimable use of the frontier types so common in the northern Minnesota “pineries” of that period, casting his oh-so-proper sleuths into the oft-malodorous company of roughneck loggers, wily backcountry prostitutes, and irritable railroad employees. And he sets his action against the build-up to the Great Hinckley Fire, a calamitous inferno that took the lives of more than 400 people and wiped out at least 300 square miles of drought-etiolated timberland.
___________________________________
EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE
___________________________________
1906 by James Dalessandro (2004)
Crime fiction’s fascination with the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906—which ravaged California’s then premier city for three days, gutting more than 28,000 buildings and leaving well in excess of half the population homeless—began even before the rubble had been fully cleared. A story titled “Nick Carter’s Earthquake Clue,” published in the New Nick Carter Quarterly in August of that same year, imagined the famous dime novel detective pursuing a train-robbery case in San Francisco just as the first temblor struck. Dalessandro’s 1906 focuses instead on Annalisa Passarelli, an ambitious young journalist unsatisfied with her lot as an opera and theater critic for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Her broadsheet’s editor has been crusading against the corrupt administration of pretty-boy Mayor Eugene Schmitz, and Passarelli wants a piece of that action—or at least something more serious than covering tenor Enrico Caruso, who’s come to town to perform. So she agrees to help the police department’s high-minded chief of detectives, Byron Fallon, collect evidence against Schmitz as well as venal city attorney Adam Rolf (based in part on genuine “crime boss” Abe Ruef) and their confederate, kidnapper James “Shanghai” Kelly. Fallon’s plans are derailed, though, when he’s killed while investigating waterfront shanghaiing. It falls to Passarelli, along with Fallon’s two grown sons and an alliance of forthright cops known as The Brotherhood, to finish off Rolf’s criminal machine. In the meantime, geologists fear earth tremors may soon bring gold-rush-wealthy San Francisco to its knees. Dalessandro takes liberties with historical facts and personages, but his re-creation of the quake and fire—the latter of which caused most of the havoc—captures its full impact and otherworldliness.
___________________________________
FLOOD
___________________________________
Stealing Mona Lisa by Carson Morton (2011)
Morton’s sprightly caper novel merges two shocking, real-life incidents from early 20th-century Paris. In January 1910, heavy rainfall caused the River Seine’s water level to rise some 28 feet above normal, flooding city streets, businesses and homes, leading the sewers and electricity to fail, and drawing locals of all backgrounds together in defense of their beautiful metropolis. A year and a half later, in August 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa was pilfered from the Louvre by an Italian nationalist; it wasn’t recovered until 1914. Stealing Mona Lisa builds around one early theory regarding the painting’s disappearance: that it had fallen into the hands of a band of thieves and forgers led by charming Argentinean con man Eduardo de Valfierno. In Morton’s telling, Valfierno schemes to acquire the mystifying Mona, so that he can have it copied and then peddle those knockoffs to credulous American plutocrats. But when one of his “pigeons” proves to be less gullible than he’d hoped, quick thinking—and some quick stepping around a debilitating deluge (the 1910 flood, shifted in time here for dramatic purposes)—will be required to keep himself, his gang of rogues, and his plundered prize safe. The author’s meticulous re-creation of Belle Époque Paris and his explorations of a romance that will ultimately bring down Valfierno and his plans, enhance what is already a delightfully engineered mystery.
___________________________________
SINKING
___________________________________
The Titanic Murders by Max Allan Collins (1999)
Jacques Futrelle is remembered nowadays for two things: composing a series of short detective stories during the early 20th century, starring Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, aka The Thinking Machine; and perishing on board the RMS Titanic during its foredoomed maiden voyage, in April 1912. That Futrelle might have made a competent sleuth himself, under the right circumstances, isn’t wholly unreasonable, and Collins makes the most of that idea in these pages. We find Futrelle being asked during the Titanic’s ocean crossing to help solve the slaying of a weaselish blackguard, John Bertram Crafton, who’d approached several deep-pocketed passengers on board the mammoth White Star liner, offering to hush up exaggeratedly negative “facts” from their pasts—for a fee. The 37-year-old Futrelle and his younger wife, May (the latter of whom survived the ship’s foundering) make charming amateur gumshoes, still playfully affectionate, even after almost 17 years of marriage and two children. Between 11-course dinners and cigars in the First-Class Smoking Room, they quiz one shipmate after another, looking for reasons why those individuals might have done in the crafty Crafton. A generous amount of gossip and titillating scandal, plus a second homicide and a revealing séance, enliven this story and prevent it from descending too far into coziness. The question is, can Futrelle get to the bottom of Crafton’s death before the Titanic plunges to the bottom of the frigid North Atlantic?
___________________________________
BOMBING
___________________________________
The Air Raid Killer by Frank Goldammer, translated by Steve Anderson (2018)
Before World War II, the Baroque-styled German city of Dresden was known as the “Florence of the Elbe.” Yet as this yarn commences, 1944 is sliding into 1945 and Dresden is more like hell on earth. The Soviet army menaces it from the east, refugees have stretched local food supplies thin, and promises of a Nazi “wonder weapon” to reverse the war’s tide sound increasingly hollow. Against that backdrop, Detective Inspector Max Heller, a married, middle-aged veteran of the last war, tackles the case of a nurse found mutilated and gruesomely displayed. Similar murders soon occur and rumors spread of a slavering, cackling demon called the Fright Man, who strikes during air-raid warnings. Heller unearths few leads and faces multiple obstructions to his efforts, including a shortage of fellow cops (most of them having been sent off to die in battle) and the installation of a corrupt, merciless SS officer as his new boss. Then, just as he’s chasing his quarry through the nighttime streets, Allied planes begin raining bombs and incendiary devices onto Dresden, eventually razing the city center and killing more than 22,000 people. Goldammer’s evocation of a metropolis besieged may be the headline attraction here, but the tenacious Heller is no less memorable. How can he maintain a moral core and continue to pursue the Fright Man when all about him is chaos, and merely living is so arduous a trial?
___________________________________
SMOG
___________________________________
Breathe by Dominick Donald (2018)
“Pea-soupers” is what London residents called the yellow-gray winter fogs that bedeviled Britain’s capital as a result of residential coal fires and industrial development. During most years, those brumes were harmless; but December 1952 brought an extraordinarily malodorous and malevolent gloominess, now recalled as the Great Smog of London, a four-day air-pollution event that provoked thousands of deaths and finally led to the enactment of clean-air legislation. That very murk plays a central role in Donald’s—dare I say it?—atmospheric debut novel starring Richard Bourton, a probationer cop who’s endeavoring to adjust to post-World War II London life amid rationing, bombing rubble, and insufficient housing. While awaiting the arrival of his fiancée, a fetching White Russian refugee from China with a troubling cough and equally troubling secrets, Bourton comes to suspect that the shooting of a colleague and other recent crimes are connected—and point to a killer who employs the soot-laden fogs and the silence that accompanies them as cover for his iniquitous enterprises. When higher-ups balk at his conjectures, Bourton turns to wartime associates to expose the person behind those predations—an authentic historical villain, as it turns out. A different but no less engaging use of the Great Smog in fiction can be found in C.J. Sansom’s alternative-history thriller, Dominion (2012).
___________________________________
HURRICANE
___________________________________
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke (2007)
Hurricanes have figured into the plots of numerous crime novels, from Todd Downing’s Murder on the Tropic (1936) and John D. MacDonald’s Murder in the Wind (1956) to Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen (1995). But Hurricane Katrina, the Category 5 storm that clobbered New Orleans in August 2005—swamping streets and whole neighborhoods, killing hundreds of people and stranding tens of thousands more, and revealing the federal government’s incompetent disaster response—boasts a particularly powerful presence in The Tin Roof Blowdown, Burke’s 16th novel starring New Orleans cop-turned-Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Robicheaux. Sent to help restore order to the Big Easy, where predators exploit the chaos and even police have become looters, Robicheaux is drawn into the predicament of an African-American bail jumper who, together with his younger cousin and a pair of armed-robbery specialists, hijacks a boat from a junkie priest seeking to rescue trapped parishioners, only to then stumble across a cache of drugs and dough secreted in a mobster’s home. Soon afterward, however, those thieves come under fire when they try to swipe gas from a white insurance company executive, whose daughter recognizes two of them as her rapists. Stoking these pages with further tension is a stalker bent on harassing Robicheaux’s adopted daughter. Violent at times, but filled with New Orleans history (an anecdote about President Lyndon B. Johnson coming to rescue the city from Hurricane Betsy in 1965 is especially delightful), Tin Roof is a poignant love letter to a corner of the map that for a time appeared lost to the caprices of nature.
* * *
Also worth mentioning: Jed Rubenfeld’s The Death Instinct (2010), which kicks off on September 16, 1920, with a factual (and still unsolved) bombing in New York City’s Wall Street financial district that took the lives of 38 people and left hundreds of others injured; Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly’s The Tilted World (2013), about a pair of Prohibition agents arriving in the American South in 1927 to look for “moonshiners” and the killers of two previous “revenuers”…just as the Great Mississippi Flood threatens homes, farms, and towns in 10 states; and Ariel Lawhon’s Flight of Dreams (2016), bringing to life crewmen and passengers (including one bent on revenge) aboard the doomed German zeppelin Hindenburg as it sailed across the Atlantic in 1937.
