While Nick Griffin’s favorite character in his latest novel, Dizzy City, is the main character Ben, Griffin ends up falling for Katherine, the heroine. “She is someone who is so caught up in the life through her own wiles and eye for a quick buck. She doesn’t know how to remove herself. I rooted for her,” he said. “In fact, I changed the ending to suit her rather than Ben.”
It’s not surprising that the characters in Dizzy City beguile even the author into doing them favors. The novel is a fast-paced story about Ben, a British soldier who deserts his World War I battalion, arrives in America in 1916 and becomes involved in a series of elaborate bunko schemes designed to fleece the unsuspecting. Ben is the perfect con man; he’s charming, sensitive and sly, but he has a fatal flaw. He is haunted by friends who died on the battlefield.
Dizzy City is Griffin’s fifth book and it took the longest to write. His other books, about pirates, a Grand Tour of Italy, 18th century medicine and one nonfiction book about the Caucasus, all required travel to get the details rights. For The Requiem Shark, he sailed a tall ship through the Caribbean. There were months of rugged travel through the Caucasus. He spent three months on the road in Italy for The Masquerade. “You can never get to where your imagination wants to go,” he said, “but does help to put yourself in roughly similar circumstances.”
But writing about World War I, New York City in 1916 and intricate con games, there aren’t many places to visit. Even Black Tom Island, scene of a spectacular explosion of 2,000 tons of WWI munitions, no longer exists.
Griffin began writing Dizzy City in 2001. “The explosion of Black Tom Island originally started the book,” he said. “That’s what I felt like writing at the time. You got a real sense of panic and the unknown on that day.” Black Tom Island and pier was located near Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. It contained warehouses and ships full of fuel and ammunition that would have benefited the British, French and Russian forces in the war. In the early hours of July 30, 1916, a fire was lit by German saboteurs. The explosion rocked lower Manhattan, parts of New Jersey and shattered windows as far north as Times Square. “For years and years the Statue of Liberty had shrapnel holes up and down the body. The fact that only seven people died that night is staggering,” he said.
The explosion at Black Tom and what happened on 9/11 “doesn’t work as a comparison. But obviously the echoes are there,” Griffin said. “Today, the war is so distant. It doesn’t exist on a day-to-day level. You don’t feel it.” Ben, who is thousands of miles from battle, still has a war raging in his head. Post-traumatic stress was not an official diagnosis then. “They didn’t know what it was at the time,” Griffin said. “The army had no idea. It wasn’t a question of courage or cowardice. It seemed that no matter what deeds you had done or how many people you had saved, one day you woke up and you just wanted to get out of there.”
Ben sees his closest friends die on the battlefield. Griffin said, “It’s an appalling idea that seemed wonderful at the time--Pal Battalions—where you join up with every single friend you have.” In England, the impact of the war would move in pockets from town to town. “Whatever group of friends that was sent to the front that morning, that group would be wiped out.”
In 1916, the U.S. had not yet joined the war. In America, from 1880 to 1920, it was the golden age of the con. The heart of Dizzy City is a con game with shifting alliances. Elaborate stings flourished in New York. “You had these complicated shops with 15 to 20 people who developed these terribly complicated scams. You can’t imagine that you would be the victim of this elaborate theatricality. One person, two people, maybe. But if you have 15 people all telling you the same thing, you’re going to believe it.”
“Above all things,” he said, “it’s fun work. Con stories are very entertaining for everyone, except for the poor guy on the wrong end of it all. But then, it’s even entertaining for him while it’s happening, and probably even in retrospect as well."--Sherry Mazzocchi
Chelsea resident Nicholas Griffin will be reading from Dizzy City this Thursday, September 6, at 7 pm at 192 Books, on 10th Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets.
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