The nonfiction writer David Grann has long been fascinated by obsessive men and women who go to staggering lengths to satisfy their obsessions – by embarking on perilous quests or labouring for years to expose some hidden truth or public lie.
“I always thought that my fascination with obsessed people was because they made the best stories,” Grann told the CBS show 60 Minutes last month. “Over time, I began to realise that I might have a little bit more in common with some of these obsessives than I care to admit.”
Grann, 56, is the workhorse author of five books and a sheaf of deeply researched articles for the New Yorker, where he’s been a staff writer since 2003.
His books have proved enormously popular with readers, from 2009’s The Lost City of Z to his latest, The Wager, which topped the New York Times bestseller list earlier this month. Now they’re hot property in Hollywood, too. Three of Grann’s stories have been filmed and released over the past six years, with three more adaptations on the way – most notably Martin Scorsese’s take on Grann’s 2017 masterpiece Killers of the Flower Moon, is which is coming to UK cinemas in October.
“He’s a natural storyteller, with such a beautiful sense of literary structure,” says Grann’s friend and New Yorker colleague Burkhard Bilger.
“He marshals all this information into these really compelling narratives that just won’t let you go. I feel like more than anybody else at the magazine, his pieces are made to order for Hollywood, because they have such sturdy structures and dramatic twists built in. It’s almost like he thinks like a film-maker when he’s looking for stories.”
For Grann, structure is a quest in itself. “I do always think there is some idyllic form of a story, some perfect pristine lost city that you’re always trying to get to,” he told 60 Minutes.
But there are plenty of deviations along the way. Bilger recalls visiting Grann at his house in a suburb of New York, where he lives with his wife, the journalist and TV producer Kyra Darnton, and their two children. Asked what he’d been up to, Grann confessed that he’d spent the past four months learning how to build an 18th-century British man o’ war, as part of his research for The Wager, which charts a disastrous naval voyage around Cape Horn in the 1740s.
“He said it was kind of a fool’s errand, like, is this going to come into any use? And it’s true that if you look at the book, it’s only a few pages, but it’s absolutely one of my favourite parts.”
Grann is not merely an archive digger: he’s also prepared to follow his subjects to the ends of the earth. Despite his unathletic build and a degenerative eye condition, Grann has tracked his protagonists deep into the Amazon, for The Lost City of Z, and through rough seas to a remote Patagonian island for The Wager – itself due to be adapted by Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“What really distinguishes him for me,” says Nick Paumgarten, another New Yorker colleague, “is that his work shows the virtue of getting it right, of not taking any shortcuts and doing the deep reporting. It’s heartening to know that there’s a commercial place for that kind of hard work and devotion to the finer points.”