My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous events to enliven straightforward history—is no doubt in the offing. Which is not a bad thing, either. (Already, the Chicago Architectural Foundation puts on a tour based on the book.)
ERIK LARSON. The Devil in the White City (2003).
History, indigestible in its raw form, is ultimately a matter of how you slice it. Larson cuts out two pieces of Chicago history, circa 1893, and juxtaposes them in a way that casts a dramatic shadow over the larger of the pair and an aura of significance over the smaller one. The big piece was the World’s Columbian Exposition, an epoch-defining convocation on the shore of Lake Michigan that introduced visitors to alternating-current electricity, the Ferris Wheel, Shredded Wheat, and the idea that the frontier era in U.S. history had come to a close. The relative small piece, in world-historical terms, was the homicidal career of Dr. Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, arguably the first American serial killer of the modern type. Holmes built a hotel, later known as his “murder castle,” not far from the fairground’s White City—an expanse of alabaster buildings, all designed in a Beaux Arts style by Daniel Burnham and his team of renowned architects. (Burnham’s struggles to plan and erect the fair’s physical plant occupy much of the book; Larson has perhaps an undue faith in his readers’ taste for stories of bureaucratic jousting.) Apart from that geographic coincidence, these stories have little connection to one another. But, in wedging them together with a sure narrative hand, Larson makes vivid a previously drab-seeming period of the American past.
