Poured Over: Erik Larson on The Splendid and the Vile
“Believe me, there probably was not a day that went by where I didn’t say to myself, What on earth am I doing? And why did I take this on? Early on in the process I was talking with a Churchill expert over breakfast in Washington, DC, and he was basically asking me, Why on earth are you doing this? And my answer to him, which stuck through throughout the whole project, is that it’s all in the telling.” The Splendid and the Vile spent most of 2020 and ‘21 on top of the bestseller charts, and it’s just out in paperback. Erik Larson joins us on the show to talk about the craft of writing, how his background in journalism prepared him for a career writing bestselling books, how he conducts his research, the fiction that inspires him, and the surprises he uncovered while writing about one of the world’s most-documented men, and more.
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
Featured books:
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
From this episode:
B&N: I want to talk about craft, about research, about all of the interesting stuff that goes into the making of a book like The Splendid and the Vile. And yes, you’re Erik Larson, but you chose Winston Churchill, who is one of the most well documented man on the face of the earth….
Erik Larson: Believe me, there probably was not a day that went by where I didn’t say to myself, What on earth am I doing? And why did I take this on? Early on in the process I was talking with a Churchill expert over breakfast in Washington, DC, and he was basically asking me, Why on earth are you doing this? And my answer to him, which stuck throughout the whole project, is that it’s all in the telling. Yes, I know, everybody’s written a zillion books about Churchill. And I know that a dozen biographies and other books will come out this year alone. But there was a very specific question that I wanted to answer. And that was how Churchill, his family and his close advisors get through that initial German air campaign, that basically year long campaign that began May 10, 1940, and ended literally May 10, 1941. And just on an intimate level, what that was like–and nobody had ever done that before. How remarkable is that? Yeah, I was like, Wow, lucky me.
B&N: You also have great research skills. So let’s start there, because we’ve got a really big cast. You’ve got the Brits, you’ve got Churchill’s family, you’ve got the Germans. I mean, there are a lot of moving parts to the story. Obviously, you’re deep in the research. But what’s revealing itself first? Is it the characters?You have the idea; we’re clear on that. But what’s next?
Erik Larson: When I when I get an idea about why I want to do a book, I always look very closely at the idea. I do a very detailed book proposal (my agent says I probably don’t really need to do that anymore, a letter would probably suffice). This is for my sake, to know that the thing I’m working on is actually really there. And so it was really heavily driven by Churchill, of course; he was one of the great characters, if you will, of all time, but also the people in his life who in themselves were charismatic in some way. His close advisers like Lord Beaverbrook, his science adviser, Frederick Lindemann, known as The Prof. His daughter, Mary Churchill, who was vital to the telling of this story. And his daughter-in-law, Pamela Digby, ultimately Herrmann, who was a wonderful character as well. Once I had a sense of all these characters, I get very architectural, I get a big piece of drawing paper, big ruler, and I draw the arcs of these people where they converge and how they converge. And I was really amazed to find that in the creation of this book, that so many things came together, at the end of that one year on May 10, 1941.
A lot of people sort of make the mistaken observation that my goal was to write about the first year of Churchill, as prime minister was not at all my goal just happened to work out that way. That that was the period encompassed by this initial German air campaign. And from a narrative perspective, it’s like I died and went to heaven. All these things that converge on May 10 1941. At the end of that year, not just the end of this German air campaign, but big changes in sort of serious challenge to Churchill’s hegemony, and Rudolf Hess. Hitler’s number two parachutes into Scotland. It’s like all these things came together. I couldn’t believe it, it was just a lovely sort of confidence. Once I have a narrative structure, once I have my characters are, it becomes a very simple matter of just trying to find everything I possibly can about those characters to make them come alive. It’s not about making anything up. It’s about finding their details, and bringing those to life.