Title: The Devil In The White City
Author: Erik Larson
Year: 2004
Genre: True Crime, Thriller, History
Two men, one an architect of the Chicago World Fair, the other one of America’s most infamous serial killers. This true crime thriller tells the story. The book was selected by my local book shop, Blue Sheep Books, to be this months True Crime read.
The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, a visionary landscape of white buildings set in beautiful gardens and lakes for the Chicago World Fair in 1893, which he created in just two years.
The killer was Dr. H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor known for his striking blue eyes and charm towards women. He used the World Fair to lure scores of young women to their deaths.
As one battled with bureaucracy, infighting, personality clashes and the formidable Chicago winters to complete the fair on time, the other built his own edifice close by, he called it the World’s Fair Hotel but in reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber and a crematorium.
In Erik Larson’s true crime thriller, we see how the lives of these two men become intertwined around one of the most iconic events in American history at the dawn of a new century and how the web finally closed in on discovering this evil serial killer.
On the outset of reading this book I had no knowledge of the Chicago World Fair or H. H. Holmes. I would probably bring this down to being from the UK and only really studying British and European history in school so whilst I was aware London and Paris had hosted fairs, the one in Chicago I was completely unaware of.
In describing the events leading up to the fair and what Burnham had to get through to even get the fair open in time is nothing short of extraordinary and Larson explains in great detail everything that happened to achieve this event, against all the odds.
From the initial optimism when Chicago won the right to host the fair in 1890, to the feeling of everything being bought to a stand still as layer upon layer of bureaucracy and more and more people became involved which made progress feel like wading through treacle and you really can empathize with the architects behind the fair who had the eyes of America and the world on them to try to surpass what Paris achieved with their fair a few years earlier and how little time they had to pull it off.
Larson also explains the backdrop and shows the World Fair in the context of what was happening within Chicago and America at the time and in turn how this helped Holmes to commit his crimes and remain undetected for a number of years afterwards,
With a growing recession and economic downturn throughout the country, more and more people were turning to Chicago for work, knowing that the World’s Fair at least would provide some temporary opportunities and relief which caused the floodgates to open. Adding onto this the city was already known for being dirty and violent and easy to disappear in with a largely ineffectual police force and it created the perfect storm for an evil serial killer to strike again and again.
In describing Holmes murders, as Larson explains only at the end of the book, many of the precise details of the murders and the full extent of the crimes will never be known, as Holmes had ways of disposing of many of his victims remains, turning many into cadavers so quite a lot of these sections are conjecture, although some victims were known and Larson does use this to create a picture of the violent ways he killed these women. Larson does write these in the style of a conventional thriller, murder-mystery and I did find whilst reading the book it was these parts that kept me reading, over the more detail driven and perhaps a little dry descriptions of Burnham’s preparations for the fair and even a bit textbook-y in their style of writing.
However the final section of the book describes how Detective Franklin Geyer put the pieces together in 1895 and how the Chicago police finally uncovered the extent of Holmes crimes in 1895, which is the most gripping part of the book although it is is the most disturbing as well.
Back to the descriptions of the fair and one of the striking things Larson gets across is how much the event touched America and the world and in some ways continues to do so to this day. From foodstuffs that launched there such as Shredded Wheat, to Ferris’ Eiffel-Tower beating Ferris Wheel, to even indirectly with construction worker Elias Disney inspiring his son Walt with stories of the White City in the years afterwards, the power of this event and how it has echoed through time is very well depicted in the book.
A couple of occasions I did notice the odd typo and strange sentence structure, also sometimes the book makes references to other historical figures from America that I had to search, again because of my lack of knowledge of American history but it would have been nice if the book in the UK had more context behind these.
Overall the book describes a moment in time that captures both the heights that society can reach when it works together, as well as unspeakable evils of the worst kind that can happen just around the corner and whilst at times it can be a bit dry to read through it was a memorable read and I definitely learnt about a period of American history I was unfamiliar with.
If you have read this book, let me know in the comments down below what you think.
