The Devil in the White City: Dredging the Swamp for Details

Erik Larson trails characters across the pages of The Devil in the White City with an eye focused on an end, not unlike the driven nature of the designers and planners of the Chicago World’s Fair; some of them appearing in fleeting introductions and imagery, some in painfully lingering density (repeated accounts of tooth pain, foot troubles and other assorted ailments, along with personal rivalries). In Larson's attention to the architects and landscape designer, project manager, competing showmen, and power players, I see a failed attempt to build emotional connection due to its overextended scope—even with my diligent efforts of flipping back in the text to relocate individual names and roles in the drama. 

In fact, there is drama to be explored in the immensity of the fight for and design of the dazzling fair and in its multifaceted reach to the past glories of the American Wild West, splendors of Greco-Roman façade, amusement mecca of the Midway and in the risks of placing the strange, shocking and foreign on display before a “buttoned up age,” (227) all amid avant-garde household and industrial technology and engineering marvels. But, Larson, as the supreme history professor, balanced and complete in his accounting, buries the poignant stories of Root and Burnham, and the horror that is Holmes in the wonders of historical moment and consequence. 

I must confess, Larson had almost lost my interest completely by page 61 (of the 370 or 390 pages if you are sucked into the Epilogue, as I was, of course, and then the notes are tempting as well, to a history oriented mind). Once the narrative finally takes hold, on page 63, with the shrieking pigs snatched from the “Bridge of Sighs” and Dr. H. H. Holmes seduction of Myrta, it is too often interrupted by fascinating tidbits of tasty historical and cultural trivia. By now, I am into the story arc, so I read on, but the history buff in me is intermittently distracted from it by Larson’s penchant for including name-dropping worthy connections to the fair. 

The characterizations of the bamboozled wives are as thin as the affection that Holmes holds them in—ghosts before they are dead. In one sense, aptly so, because they are just that in the narrative and Holmes is the character we seek to comprehend, but in another sense they are nothing but statistics, still, after the read; their humanity has not been restored, leaving Holmes to win the day. 

H. H. Holmes

Even Detective Frank P. Geyer, the hero of the tragedy, if there can be one, is painted with too light a stroke. Larson writes, “What irked Geyer most was that the central question was still unanswered: Where were the children now?” Irked! Was the man a machine that he didn’t at least worry for their safety or hope that they were yet alive? If so, wasn’t that lack of emotion on Geyer’s part worth exploration or, at least, explanation?

Detective Frank P. Geyer, Philadelphia

from his book "The Holmes-Pitezel Case" (1896), page 182

And Prendergast is an annoying fly buzzing about the narrative, neither fleshed-out to engage comprehension nor located more strategically to his significance. Like Harrison, he is afforded personal study and campaign detail connections that don’t move the narrative significantly—because they are a separate story that could have been alluded to once or twice and detailed at the shooting, when I would care. In that, I think Larson is married to his chronology, although he began with the aged Burnham and the shipwrecked Millet to set up one of several aside-level foreshadowing threads, which I found annoying at best—isn’t he referring to the Titanic, who is the engineer from Pittsburgh, etc.

Larson, as a historian, is ill-fitted to sieve for focal points that propel plot lines; he is hard-pressed to leave the side stories to be told elsewhere, in their own right as separate books or articles. In that sense, I am reminded of the ancient writings of Homer—too many intriguing sidelines—even though Larson’s are verifiable fact rather than fantastical accounts. Perhaps it is the wonderment of scandalous belly dancers in Bloom’s “Algerian version of the danse du ventre” and the Midway Ball with half naked exotics twirling about the floor amid enening tux and satin gown clad visitors and officials or the presence of the Dahomans of Africa—a tribe purported to be cannibals, that takes me back to Homer’s accounts of men with heads that grow below their shoulders.

However, there are moments of rich language, vivid imagery, and persons painted in exquisite detail—“the air scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck…trains bearing fangs of ice” (147) and “heat rose from the streets with the intensity of a child’s fever” (35) or “pockets of gloom whose borders shivered as Belknap and Holmes moved past” (89). The book is simply over weighted by the rest of Larson’s recordings and minutia.