Edgar Awards Countdown: The Infernal Machine

the one about dynamite, anarchists, and the birth of the surveillance state

In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the third installment: you can read about highway serial killers here and the cold case murder of an Atlanta socialite here. The awards will be announced April 30th!

Pop quiz, hotshot. How much can you tell me about the assassination of Tsar Alexander II? Before reading The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective, my answer would have been: absolutely nothing! However, now I know enough about this particular political murder, along with the six (!) failed attempts that preceded it, to build a twenty-slide PowerPoint presentation about how Alexander’s death inaugurated an age of political violence and enabled the creation of the modern police surveillance apparatus.¹ And I learned all that just from chapter 4!

Steven Johnson’s book is a sweeping historical study of how attempts to combat anarchist violence in the United States and Russia ironically created the popular appetite for a more invasive and authoritarian police state. And it reads like a political thriller. I’ll admit it: based on the title I was dreading this one. But I ended up eagerly devouring the chapters, creating no fewer than 105 annotations in my e-copy, and boring my friends and family with what I was learning about socialist agitators, Russian Nihilists, German saboteurs, fingerprint analysis, and new and exciting filing systems.²

As I’ve noted in earlier reviews, as a true crime consumer and scholar, I tend to respond more to deep dives into particular cases as a way of illuminating larger social trends and narratives. The Infernal Machine goes right to the larger social trends and narratives, and it covers a lot of ground. Though I bristled a bit at the claim that Allan Pinkerton “helped invent the genre of true crime” through his publication of thrillers documenting the exploits of his detectives, for the most part Johnson handles the two threads of his study—radical politics and the rise of the surveillance state—with superb storytelling skill. His depiction of the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel begins with the dunes over the River Elbe, white because they are comprised of the exoskeletons of single-celled algae that would produce the diatamaceous earth necessary to stabilize, and therefore allow for the easy transportation of, explosives.

This ability to control dynamite (detonating it on command, from a distance) not only enabled vast and rapid advancements in engineering and public works (you can’t build railroads or sewers too effectively without the ability to blow stuff up), it also proved to be a cheap and easily hidden weapon. As Johnson writes, “it provided the working class with firepower to match the armies of the state.” If you’re wondering what the title refers to, it’s what the press called the bombs that, over forty years, were planted in public buildings and railway stations and rallies, as well as lobbed at a few industry magnates.

Way back in the Dark Ages when I was getting my Ph.D., I specialized in American literature of the early to mid twentieth century, not least because I am so captivated by the social milieu of that time. One of the chapters of my dissertation is about the destruction of radical politics in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a novel that includes fictional portrayals of historical figures that also feature prominently in Johnson’s study, most notably Emma Goldman. So perhaps I was biographically, if surprisingly, predisposed to like this one.

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being me enjoying a mango daiquiri on a beach in Turks and Caicos and 10 being me as Captain James T. Kirk during a Tribble infestation of the Enterprise,

how annoyed will I be if The Infernal Machine wins the Edgar? 2

1. Not a hypothetical. I actually did this.

2. It’s true! This book makes a description of filing cabinets both fascinating and ominous.