Long Island Books

MICHAEL SHNAYERSON

"Big Trouble"

J. Anthony Lukas
Simon & Schuster, $32.50

So short is our attention span, and so fast the churn of news, that the story of J. Anthony Lukas and "Big Trouble" seems almost dated now.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who labored eight years to recreate a landmark murder trial in turn-of-the-century Idaho, only to kill himself as his 800-page tome neared publication, shocked the publishing world last June and stirred a flurry of anguished tributes.

Mr. Lukas's history of depression, the awful impact of his mother's suicide when he was 8, the mood-controlling drugs he neglected to take in his last days - all this was much discussed.

History At Its Best

The man hadn't chosen to die because of a book. And yet reviewers approached their task with understandable nervousness. "Big Trouble," all agreed, was a dauntingly ambitious work, exhaustively researched, wonderfully written. But so long!

Those who called it to task for its digressions did so almost in a whisper. Those who embraced the book, ironically, seemed disingenuous, too; perhaps they would have cited more objections if Mr. Lukas had lived.

Treated so gingerly, and without its author to promote it, "Big Trouble" failed to become the best-seller it was meant to be, and by the cold calculus of the chain bookstores, its shelf life must be about spent. This is a pity, for "Big Trouble" is a colorful tapestry of America on the verge of modern times, and the pleasure it affords is that of history at its best: an immersion into a time and place so vivid and complete that a reader feels he's there.

Many Friendships

Both in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, where they lived in a woodsy, shaded house surrounded by beds of myrtle, Mr. Lukas and his wife, Linda Healy, a book editor, nurtured an unusually wide range of friendships, many with other writers and editors but also, for example, with the Boston families whom Mr. Lukas had portrayed in his l985 classic, "Common Ground." (Once he'd established a bond, Mr. Lukas held on.)

My wife and I were among his social friends here. By the standards of The New York Times, where Mr. Lukas had worked with such distinction for a decade (and acquired a lifelong passion for the latest in-house gossip), that would have been grounds for declining to review his book.

Now it hardly seems to matter. The book, however, does.

Slow Going

Among his friends, Mr. Lukas's efforts to wrest "Big Trouble" into shape were well known. For a long time he felt overwhelmed by his material, and said as much. When at last he began to write, it was slow, tortuous going.

If you asked him at dinner how he was doing, he'd wince and tell you he was up to page 200, just inching along. Eventually the pace quickened - 500! 1,000! 1,500 manuscript pages and more to come! - and he grew eager to share the stories he was assembling.

I remember those dinners, but also the day last spring when he accepted an invitation to talk about the book at the John Jermain Library in Sag Harbor. The work was done but for cutting, and Mr. Lukas was in fine spirits, buoyed more so by the turnout: No fewer than 50 people had come, filling every folding chair set up in the library's upstairs room. Mr. Lukas had a lot of friends, but more than that, he had a lot of readers.

Inspired By History

After "Common Ground," Mr. Lukas confessed to the crowd, he'd slipped into a black period, unsure of what to do next, let alone how to top the book that had just won him his second Pulitzer. (The first was for a series at The Times.)

One day, he said, while sifting through a history of the 20th century in anguished search for an idea that might grab him, he actually found one: a 12-page overview of a trial in Boise, Idaho, of three mine union leaders for the murder of a former Governor named Frank Steunenberg, who was killed one late December day of 1905 as the fence gate that he opened outside his home triggered a crude but effective bomb.

The Governor's harsh strike-breaking tactics while in office had made him bitter enemies among the laborers who worked in the gold and silver mines of the new Rocky Mountain states, and his death seemed a belated act of revenge.

"Trial Of The Century"

Yet a growing number of Americans were coming to see that even compliant mine workers were treated little better than slaves. And perhaps the leaders were innocent as claimed; after all, they'd been in Denver, a whole state away, when the bomb went off.

Overnight, the murder exposed class lines in much the way that two killings outside a home in Santa Monica, Calif., would expose racial divisions nearly 90 years later. In each, the courtroom drama would be declared "the trial of the century."

At first, the case against William D. (Big Bill) Haywood and his union partners seemed strong. A mine worker confessed to the murder in impressive detail, even showing investigators how he'd placed his bomb and rigged it by string to Steun enberg's fence gate; in this and more than a dozen other murders of labor enemies he was, he declared, a hit man for Haywood's Western Federation of Miners.

Union Infiltrators

"Now let me make one little digression," Mr. Lukas told his listeners with a puckish smile.

Days after the mine worker's arrest, a master Pinkerton agent named James McParland had gotten involved. That had led Mr. Lukas to learn just how crucial and controversial a role private detectives had played in previous labor disputes.

In uniform, they'd beaten back strikers; covertly, they'd infiltrated the unions time and again. In the Steun enberg case, they now went so far as to kidnap Haywood and the other two defendants from their homes in Denver, put them on a commandeered train, and bring them into Idaho to stand trial - a baldly illegal action which the Supreme Court of Oliver Wendell Holmes sanctioned nonetheless.

Lots Of Digression

Through his exhaustive research, Mr. Lukas also learned that McParland managed to get a Pinkerton mole onto the defense team led by Clarence Darrow.

"Which prompts another digression," Mr. Lukas declared, and sailed happily off on one after another: Darrow's odd mix of populism and cynicism; divisions in the national labor movement that the Haywood case underscored; the "gentlemen of the press" who arrived to cover the trial in markedly unobjective fashion.

And yet Darrow, for all the odds against him in and out of the courtroom, in the end exercised such fiery rhetoric - and so well made the point that Idaho law forbade conviction on the testimony of a single, uncorroborated witness - that a jury of mostly bearded, dusty farmers took only one long night of deliberation to find Haywood not guilty.

Parade Of Characters

"Which prompts one more digression," Mr. Lukas exclaimed with a guilty look at his watch, and embarked on his theory that Darrow may have bribed the jury, and that Haywood may have been guilty after all.

Reading "Big Trouble" is a lot like listening to Mr. Lukas go on in this fashion for a long, long time. Of course, you don't have to sit in a folding chair for the duration.

You can curl up with "Big Trouble" on a series of early mornings, as I did, and be utterly beguiled by the enthusiasm he brings to his story, the "Ragtime"-like parade of colorful American characters who traipse across its pages, and the obsessive research that illuminates those rough-hewn times so brilliantly.

Smartly Drawn

The writing is lively, slightly formal but engagingly so. Every scene is smartly drawn. As for the digressions, well, it's true: There are too many.

When, after dozens of them, Mr. Lukas launches into a colorful disquisition about the baseball great Walter Johnson and the state of the sport in 1907 on the impetuous rationale that Clarence Darrow liked baseball and Johnson was playing nearby, restless readers may be inclined to throw their copy of "Big Trouble" against a wall.

They shouldn't. For one thing, it's a heavy book and may hurt someone. For another, the baseball digression is told so charmingly, by a writer whose love of the game was one of the great loves of his life (along with pinball, at which he excelled), that only the churlish will mutter they've been thrown off the narrative track.

No Regrets

Know this: In your own mornings of reading "Big Trouble," you may occasionally be exasperated by the detours. But you will never be bored.

About two years ago, I had lunch with Mr. Lukas at the Poxabogue golf course restaurant. After his years of uncertainty, he was just beginning to feel pleased with "Big Trouble." He knew he'd gone off on a lot of digressions, but he had no regrets about that.

"To me," he said, "the greatest pleasure is in stumbling across some new character or circumstance, and then just pursuing it, wherever it leads." Recently, he'd learned that Ethel Barrymore, on a dramatic tour of the West, had stopped in Boise, Idaho, and sat in on a day's proceedings of the trial with an old school friend from Miss Porter's.

Delightful Detail

"I had no idea how important Miss Porter's was at that time," Mr. Lukas exclaimed. So he'd spent two weeks looking into the role Miss Porter's had played in turn-of-the-century American society.

Thankfully, perhaps, that digression never made it into the final book - intellectual curiosity ought to have some limits, and even Mr. Lukas appears to have recognized that, at the end cutting his manuscript nearly in half.

But a delightful passage of Barrymore's flirtation that day with one of the Pinkertons remains: a not untypical dividend of the original research by which Mr. Lukas exhumed stashes of letters, some moldering in closets or old tins, from almost all his story's principal characters.

Author's Advice

I'd asked Mr. Lukas to lunch so that he might give me some encouragement about a book I was writing myself, which at the time seemed ill-advised. I confessed I was in despair. "Well," he said, "what's the worst that could happen?"

"The worst?" I said. "If the book doesn't work, I'll have to move somewhere - Montana, maybe. Start a whole new life. I couldn't just stay here. I couldn't live with that."

Mr. Lukas looked at me, bemused. He was a large, rather moon-faced man with raccoon-like dark streaks under his eyes; sometimes, at the end of a dinner party, my wife would persuade him to do his East Indian imitation, which was inanely perfect and always doubled her over with laughter.

"Oh come on," he said. "You're young. If you write a book you don't like, you'll write another. You get other chances. You just have to keep going."

If only - if only! - J. Anthony Lukas had not lost sight of that.

Michael Shnayerson is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Conde Nast Traveler, and the author of "The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle" (Random House). He lives on North Haven.