Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City juxtaposes two
apparently seminal events: the staging of the Chicago World Fair of
1893, and the slightly premature emergence of that twentieth-century
phenomenon the serial killer, in the shape of one Herman Webster
Mudgett. While "Mudgett" is arguably a perfect name for a
psychopath, Herman, perhaps the prototype of his kind, neatly enough
chose to call himself H.H. Holmes, after the first consulting detective,
and under that alias prowled Chicago: charming women, seducing them, and
ultimately incinerating them in his custom-built kiln. Their skeletons
he then sold to medical schools. Daniel Hudson Burnham, meanwhile, was
engaged in what was evidently the awesome task of staging a very big
fair, whose chief attraction, the Ferris Wheel, was specifically
intended to put the Eiffel Tower (and by implication the French, and
indeed the whole of Europe) in its place. Plus ca change.
There's an awful lot of detail about the building of this funfair-and I
do mean an awful lot of detail-and non-American readers might have
trouble getting quite so misty-eyed over it. Larson quotes one of the
exposition's movers and shakers as saying, after a planning meeting, "do
you realise this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the
fifteenth century?" and the context suggests we're supposed to
agree with the idiot. As for Holmes, we can only hope that the
intervening century has made life more difficult for the breed-if your
neighbour asked you to help him test his soundproof vault, wouldn't you
ask him what he needed one for? This book, Larson insists, is not a
novel, but he embroiders scenes with details he can't have knowledge of,
albeit with the same detachment with which he describes everything else.
As a result, the book seemed to me to fall between stools, though a lot
of work obviously went into it.
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