Response: "The Devil in the White City"

In case you haven’t heard, there are murmurs that Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring as H.H. Holmes in a film adaptation of The Devil in the White City. IMDb has the movie listed as “in pre-production” and estimates that it’ll be out in 2013. So, a fictional adaptation of a nonfiction book that uses fiction-inspired techniques.

And Leo, with a mustache that—if it’s as magnificent as Holmes’—will probably get its own billing in the credits. Awesome.

Character development

Despite the vast number of characters in The Devil in the White City, I rarely had trouble remembering who was who. Larson is talented at painting portraits of his cast with just the right amount of detail: more for primary characters like Holmes and Burnham, less for those like Pitezel. I imagine that it was tempting to follow some of those people’s stories further, but to do so would have been “going down the rabbit hole,” as we say in class. I admire Larson’s restraint in choosing the sharpest, most relevant information in building his characters.

One section in particular caught my attention. On page 79, Larson describes the meeting of “the eastern architects” with Burnham. He uses this great, sweeping line to quickly establish the groups’ shared experience:

All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.

He goes on with this shared description to say:

They wore dark suits and crisp white collars. All had mustaches, some dark some gray.

Then the narrative splits off to look more closely at two particularly important characters:

Post was huge, the largest man in the room. Hunt was fierce, a frown in a suit, with a client list that included most of America’s richest families. Every other mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, and along Fifth Avenue in New York seemed to have been designed by him…

Larson then swings back into describing the shared attributes of the group—namely, their similar backgrounds in education. This becomes a roundabout way of characterizing Burnham, who appears as an outsider:

For Burnham, with his failed attempts at getting into Harvard and Yale and his lack of formal architectural training, sitting down to dinner with these men was like being a stranger at someone else’s Thanksgiving.

All of this adds up to a quick, useful introduction to this mass of characters. And an artful one, no less—I just love that “frown in a suit” line.

That said, I did feel like there was one secondary character who got too much attention: the assassin Prendergast. I understand his function as a character, but every time the narrative jumped to him, I was pulled right out of the story.  I suppose I’d prefer to see him presented as a more mysterious figure . . . At the moment, he’s only a distraction from the main story—and the main murderer—for me.

Use of primary sources

Larson used an interesting assortment of primary sources to offer a snapshot of the White City's time and culture, ranging from:

- An inventory of the ailments treated by the fair’s hospital, from constipation to headaches to . . . “extreme flatulence.”  (See page 284.)

- A few different event menus that are kind of incomprehensible if your aren’t into French cuisine, but offer some cultural cues: time set aside for cigarettes and cigars, etc. (See pages 98 and 219).

- A reprint of how Burnham addressed his letter to Millet. (See page 389.):

Hon. F.D. Millet

To arrive on

Steamship Titanic

New York

Larson lets these sorts of sources stand on their own as part of the White City's world. They are more effective this way; for instance, wouldn't it have been far less powerful if Larson had simply said, "Millet was due to arrive on the Titanic"? I think there are some good lessons to take from The Devil in the White City in this regard.

Visual elements

When I saw the gorgeous cover of this book—with its old-timey font, sepia coloring, and lovely photo of The White City—I was excited to see how Larson worked images into his narrative. However, aside from the maps and architectural renderings at the beginning of the book, I only counted six other pictures in The Devil in the White City. None of them really interacted with the text in any way; rather, they only appeared as ornamentation for the title pages of each part. Part 1 offers a picture of Chicago circa 1889, Part 2 features the Manufactures and Liberal Arts building after a storm, etc.

I wonder if this was a choice by Larson or a choice by his publisher. Given the focus on architecture in this book, shouldn’t we have at least seen a picture of Holmes’ “Castle?” Or better yet, the blue prints?

(Source. Lots of pictures and videos here.)

How about pictures of Holmes’ victims, especially the children whom he murders at the end? (When I watched a documentary on Holmes, they showed drawings from 19th century magazines that illustrated how he went about killing the kids. Talk about an interesting comment on the time period.) Or more pictures of the White City and its architects over time? Maybe it's just my love of pre-1930s photography, but I feel that the absence of pictures—ones that contribute to the narrative, not just act as decoration—is a significant flaw in this book.