"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
Sir Walter Scott
Fall 2003
Volume I,
issue 2
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"Oh what a tangled
web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." |
Fall 2003 |
Lev Raphael is the mysteries columnist for the Detroit Free Press and prize-winning author of 14 books including the critically acclaimed Nick Hoffman series, Let’s Get Criminal, The Edith Wharton Murders, The Death of a Constant Lover, Little Miss Evil, and Burning Down the House. His latest novel is The German Money. His website is www.levraphael.com. Direct correspondence to Lev Raphael or to editor@lifeloom.com. |
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The Devil in the White City
I'm not a big fan of serial killer books.
That’s because I’ve been inundated with them over the years as the mystery reviewer for the Detroit Free Press, and they've become numbingly monotonous -- like Keanu Reeves' face.
Despite the ever more elaborate Grand Guignol filigree, I often feel that the authors are consulting Serial Killers for Dummies, charting the same kind of obscenely sick childhood, the same kind of scripted acting out. The books don't tend to reveal anything emotionally or psychologically because the incredible savagery perpetrated by the villains is not only derivative but actually seems beyond the pat explanations of Intro to Abnormal Psychology. Those long stretches in italics that purport to be the killer’s POV often leave me numb and bored, fighting the urge to skim.
As the genre continues to blossom like the fleur du mal that it is, the stakes keep rising, so authors compete with each other to imagine the most grotesque violence possible. Creepiest of all, some authors revel in what they I imagine they think is an ability to make your gorge rise and give you toxic goose bumps at the same time. The aim? To have you caught between wanting to puke and wanting to turn on all the lights and check your doors and windows.
In The Devil in the White City however, Erik Larson has spun a whole new variation on the serial killer story that has left me feeling anything but cynical.
Written with the detail and pacing of a (sometimes melodramatic) novel, this meticulously researched book tells the story of two geniuses -- one creative, one evil -- in 19th-century Chicago. The setting is the 1893 World’s Fair, which was meant to make Chicago shine brighter than any U.S. city. Chicago was determined to outdo Paris, whose own recent fair had produced the inimitable Eiffel Tower. As if that wasn’t enough, 1880s Chicago was black with air pollution, its sewers often overflowed and the chief tourist attraction was the stockyards where curious couples could see animals borne off to slaughter.
While architect Daniel Burnham labored to mobilize Chicago to build a glorious "White City" that would attract and impress the country and the world, doctor H.H. Holmes was building something far more sinister: a hotel to which he lured young women he would trap and gas to death. Holmes may be one of America’s most infamous serial killers, with dozens of victims, and the author writes about his machinations without ever salaciously dwelling on his crimes. Alternating chapters between creation and destruction, Larson doesn’t just tell a particular story, for the book broadens out to present us with the eternal puzzle of human nature: how can we bring so much beauty into the world, and so much suffering, too?
Larson originally intended to write a nonfiction about a killer that would, he said in an interview with me, "produce the same nice effect as Caleb Carr's novel The Alienist," which he read in 1994 and was inspired by. But Holmes, whom he came across early in his research, at first seemed "too lurid, too over-the-top bad." It was reading about the Chicago World’s Fair that hooked Larson and helped him write a book that hooks readers with its twin stories of amazing civic goodwill and a slew of murders. "The two together really did seem to tell a story greater than the sum of their parts," he said.
To write this book, Larson consulted archival material at the Chicago Historical Society and the Art Institute of Chicago as well as making a pilgrimage to the Library of Congress where Holmes' memoir is shelved in the rare book collection. He also read widely in the character of psychopaths, but all of his research is skillfully integrated. Asked how long it took him, Larson explained: "If I had been able to squeeze all my research into 40 hour weeks, back to back, the research alone would have taken about two years, with another year and a half for the writing. But of course the process never works out quite so neatly."
If Larson whets your appetite for original approaches to the serial killer motif, you should also read Carlo Lucarelli’s breathtaking Almost Blue. Set in Bologna, it features a sexy, young female inspector, Grazia Negro, with a lot to prove and a lot to learn whose search for the killer of students is aided by a blind man eavesdropping on the city’s chatter with his scanner. Lucarelli masterfully plunges us into the blind man’s haunting world of sounds while charting his growing intimacy with Negro and creates without cliches the bizarre inner world of a psychotic killer.
And for the most unusual take on the subject I’ve read in years, there’s Chris Niles’ mordant, gruesome, and fast-paced Hell’s Kitchen, which plays with the city’s famed high rents and low vacancy rate. Feckless millionaire Cyrus Tower is this book’s spider, luring victims to his web by offering a good sublet and then offing them. His psychosis is based on a self-help book, and Niles’s thriller offers hilarious social satire of contemporary romance, the media, the idle rich, and would-be writers.
Copyright 2003 by Lev Raphael The Web Mystery Magazine is an on-line quarterly journal dedicated to investigating the mysterious genre in print, in film, and in real-life. The Web welcomes well-researched, well-written
articles and reviews. Writers are invited to send letters and inquiries to editor@lifeloom.com. "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
Sir Walter Scott