Where in Hell is the Devil? Thoughts on Plot and Research in The Devil in the White City

Mr. H.H. Homes himself. (Source: catkinsdiet.tumblr.com)

I have to admit that I was pretty excited to read Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City. The subtitle really snagged me: “Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.” I have a penchant for both historical nonfiction and factual crime writing. Call it a dark nerdiness. I was eager to explore a volume that juxtaposes a fleeting moment in history with one of human nature’s most constant, reoccurring elements: our ability to do gruesome harm to others. I was generally familiar with H.H. Holmes as a murderous entity. You don’t grow up in the Midwest with a fascination in the grim without hearing something about the serial killer doctor who made a name for himself in a hotel outfitted with homicidal secret rooms, levers, and corpse disposal devices. I was only a little aware of the marvels of the 1893 World’s Fair and was eager to learn more about the no-doubt fascinating elements that made it what it was. So, I sat down with Devil in the White City ready to dig in to a meaty piece of historical crime nonfiction that, like the reviews on the back outside cover promised, would be “engrossing,” “dazzling,” and “utterly fascinating.”

            Having completed the reading, I can’t say that this book lived up to even a fraction of the hype my own brain had generated. Yes, I expected something different than what the book truly is—and that is, in part, my own fault. After all, what published document ever included anything but glowing reviews on its covers? I have a certain angle to my interests and I made a mistake in expecting a book to conform to such particulars. However, beyond my own faulty expectations, I still must conclude that Larson’s work is quite inexcusably (and surely purposely) mis-titled. For a book marketed as a great work of fact crime writing, it sure concentrates its telling on a disproportionally small amount of writing about actual crime. Instead, this book details meticulously, at great length, nearly every aspect of putting together the World’s Fair of ’93. There are character profiles of the Chicago Gilded Age’s most influential men, meeting notes, dinner menus, pages detailing petty arguments between architects, paragraphs and paragraphs of narrative worry over whether or not the Fair will ever open its doors. (Spoiler Alert circa 1893: It does.)

            There is no doubt: Larson did an incredible amount of research for this book. His endnotes span to #390—one for each page written. His bibliography includes dozens upon dozens of books, periodicals, letters and diaries. There is no little value to the fact that he amassed so much information into the pages of one volume. Devil in the White City stands as an invaluable resource for anyone longing to know how, exactly, the Chicago World’s Fair was executed on the executive scale (we hear very little about the experience of the worker or employee). In general, he was able to translate these primary and secondary sources into the embodiment of several vivid characters—most notably Burnham and Olmstead—thus offering human softness to the pages of factual recollection. What Devil in the White City does not stand as, in my mind, is a great, or even all that good, work of crime writing.

(Source: broadwayworld.com)

According to my calculations, there are but 132 pages written on Holmes and his crimes—as opposed to the remaining 258 pages left to detail Burnham’s every move along with a seemingly inconsequential (for the means of this book, that is) foray into the assassin, Prendergast. The lopsidedness of these two narrative strains raises questions in my mind beyond the choice in titling—if I were to be very diplomatic, I could see the “Devil” in the title as a reference to the complications and tragedies experienced in making and maintaining the fairgrounds, rather than only an allusion to Holmes. Rather, it makes me question the way that research clearly dictated the drive of this book. One of the reasons why the Gilded Age is so vivid in the minds of modern society is that it was an exceedingly well-documented era, as Larson himself details. Literacy was on the rise, meaning that letters describing all parts of daily life were long and frequent. Newspapers were gaining speed and readers, so that civic and other events were recorded and interpreted for future generations. Still and moving pictures were becoming exceedingly common, marking the first time in history where we are able to judge and assess an era not only on words, documents and subjective art work, but actual, factual images. From this flurry of sources, Larson was able to craft a three-dimensional world around Burnham and his colleagues—other that digging up such elements, he just had to read, study and turn them out with his narrative flair into chapters. In many ways, the writing appearing in those 258 pages was already half finished for Larson before he even sat down at his computer. The facts, the quotes—they were there already. (I don’t mean to minimize his effort here—this no doubt demanded an extreme amount of work and thought.)

What seems to have been much less pre-packaged is information on Holmes. Until his arrest, he was a nobody (an identity deeply connected to his ability to commit such murders) and therefore had a much smaller paper trail than the rest of the book’s subjects. What Larson did have was witness testimony and Holmes’ own memoir—all produced after the murders had been discovered. Drawing an authentic character out of such slanted and colored sources was a huge challenge—one I think Larson met by simply overwhelming the reader with the research he WAS able to rely upon: all those meticulously detailed (and, in my opinion, really quite boring) Fair facts. In some places, Larson seemed to take liberties with Holmes’ story, offering conjecture or narrative interpretation, as evidenced in the scene describing Anna’s final thoughts as she suffocated in the vault. In other places, though, it seemed like Larson was wary of stepping outside of the information his sources offered, making the chapters on Holmes brief and mounted in foreshadowing that never truly developed into the excitement it promised.

Why was Larson so hesitant to expand upon Holmes’ personality and crimes at times and not at others? What consequences accrue when a writer forms structure and plot around research that is readily available? In the case of this book, I would say that the major consequence is a lopsided plot and a number of boring pages leading nowhere. I think the disparity in focus between the two subjects might have been easier for me to take had the two story strains been working together towards an insightful, revolutionary theme. However, when I reached the final pages, I found nothing of the sort. It seems to me that the juxtaposition between murderer and creators was merely meant to highlight the irony and fallacies inherent in building a city meant to epitomize progress, culture and beauty amongst a setting of increasing filth and depravity. Sure, this is an interesting idea to consider, but one I found to be apparent within the first 20 pages—meaning that I did not need another 370 pages to drill the point home. After all, isn’t evil behind the face of success kind of the well-known theme of the Gilded Age as a whole? What then, does Larson offer us in this juxtaposition that we don’t already know well enough? What was billed as “a wonderfully unexpected book” that balances “grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World’s Fair” (from the back cover) is, in my opinion, not. It would be better classified as a book of historical documentation than a story of “Murder, Magic and Madness.”

The form and framing of this book did imbed in me some lingering questions, however: How does an author build suspense in the telling of a historical event, the ending of which many readers are already aware? Should suspense even be an attempted story-telling technique in historical nonfiction? I personally found Larson’s continued attempt to build suspense and speculation around whether or not the Fair would be completed or successful an annoying time waster. What made this device especially annoying was the uniformity in the way he attempted it: a line break and then a single, short sentence before a chapter or section’s end. Hey, Larson: the cover of your book is a picture of the Fair. We know it happened, so stop trying to make us worry that it might not. In my mind, Larson’s suspense attempts is tantamount to a writer crafting a book on the Titanic that works to get readers’ biting their nails over whether or not the ship really was “unsinkable.” On the other hand, the suspension elements did serve to show just how precarious the situation was, how contingent the Fair’s existence was on so many small factors. It highlighted the domino effect that dictates the failure or success of such massive undertakings. So then, when is it appropriate to use suspense in historical nonfiction, and how is it best used? I’ll try to consider this as I look back over other nonfiction works of history that I found more satisfying than Larson’s apparent masterpiece.