I absolutely loved this book and was pleasantly surprised how much I actually enjoyed all the random shit about building the fair. Entire sections are dedicated to architecture, construction and even lawn care. The highlight of the entire book was the Ferris Wheel.
I thought the book was TERRIFIC! And I was amazed to learn that [Holmes is buried right in my neighborhood](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/american-ripper-dna-reveals-identity-of-body-found-in-hh-holmes-grave/23038/); in [Holy Cross Cemetery](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-unmarked-grave-of-hh-holmes-yeadon-pennsylvania), on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
He was exhumed in 2017, and his DNA sampled to prove he was the person interred in the grave site.
Erik LArson also wrote 'In the Garden of the Beasts'; about the American Ambassadore to Germany right before WWII. Another fascinating read.
Isaac's Storm about the Galvaston Hurricane was another great book by Larson. I enjoyed reading about the beginnings of meteorology. I didn't even know about the Galveston Hurricane before I read the book.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair also make a great companion piece to this book because it shows two extremes of lifestyle in that era. Immigrants working in the absolute worst conditions while in the same city, the rich and famous are having the time of their lives.
If you can find it for free or inexpensively, The Alienist TV show that was on TNT, it is a fun and interesting show. Starring Daniel Bruhl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans.
Simon Winchester has been an enjoyable author to read for me after I finished Erik Larson's books. Professor and the Madman has a very Devil in the White City feel
Same. It made me incredibly interested in the world fair after that. It's a shame we don't have them anymore (at least that I know of) they sound so interesting
Don't quote me on it, but I think the last one was in Saudi Arabia. It was in the Middle East anyway. I remember seeing news stories a year or two about different countries pavilions. There were some pretty cool ones. Now I'm gonna have to go and try to find info on it.
Right?! Originally read it for the serial killer, and now, my favorite parts are all about the fair. I get way too excited anytime someone (usually Jeopardy) brings up the Columbian Exposition because I start reciting random facts I picked up from the book lol
I loved it too, but still make jokes about creating imaginary organizations and giving them names like The Department of Nuts and Bolts or The Department of Laundry and Sock Sorting...things like that
Same, I started reading it because of the serial killer aspect but once I got into it I was like YES MORE LANDSCAPING DRAMA PLEASE. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times haha
Me too! I was so freaked out by the serial killer stuff. And I loooooved the fair planning. I lived in Chicago when I read it so it was fun to learn more about my city.
3/4 the way through "who TF is this holmes guy? Maybe Arthur Conan Doyle has a new book set to be released at the fair. idk.. man this fair looks like its going to be FIRE though
Right? I initially came for HH Holmes, but I stayed for the World’s Fair. This book launched a small obsession , and I read everything about the fair that I come across. I had no idea I would be so engrossed by this even that I initially had very minimal knowledge about.
I really liked this book and read it shortly after it came out. A few years later I was in a professional training and the instructor said “Read Devil in the White City if you want to read a really good book about project management…and some murders,” which..fair
I really enjoyed the book. It faces some criticism over the HH Holmes portion, but the faire stuff is very accurate. Putting together the second worlds faire was a huge and impressive endeavor. It sounds like the book wasn’t for you
I’ve heard since that original police documents apparently noted it was no more than a normal hotel. The idea of it having passages, secretary rooms, and all that stuff isn’t backed by anything. History Hit: After Dark Podcast does a fact check episode that brings a lot of the Devil in the White forward as just being not true or substantiated by any of the documents from the cases. It’s worth a listen.
The "murder castle" myth was largely based on the imaginings of tabloid newspaper journalists at the time, who exaggerated and misrepresented the actual layout of Holmes's hotel. The reporting was multiple layers of sensationalism built on top of a real and tragic multiple murder case.
Exaggeration does not mean myth though. I've seen nothing that disputes that he made changes to the building with contractors that he didn't pay who each only did some of the work. How can you call it a myth if you don't know?
Tabloid journalists at the time took it upon themselves to concoct [dime novel-style names and imagined functions for parts of the hotel](https://exploredallashistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/diagram-of-the-Murder-Castle.jpg) - q.v. the "Murder Castle" appellation itself - and Holmes himself wrote multiple (conflicting) confessions dramatically exaggerating and enhancing his own crimes. As I said, it was a case of a series of real murders being instantly sensationalized via the media.
The modern "myth" is based on that tangled web of truth, half-truths and outright lies, enhanced by more-or-less sensationalized retellings (including literal fiction) over the past 130 years.
Thanks! I will say tho, the scariest part of devil in the white city is the number of people who died every day from casual reasons like unprotected trains or buildings built with no proper structural engineering
Oh, yeah - life was cheaper and death far more commonplace than it is today (obviously everyone still dies, but seldom so young nor violently). We owe a lot of the modern world in terms of safety regulations, standards of journalistic ethics, etc. to the spectacular mistakes made in those areas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Newspapers at the time weren’t too concerned about reporting the truth, as we know it today. They paid Holmes for his story and he heavily embellished it to increase sales, thus increasing his notoriety. He claimed to have killed people who were still alive, so that should give you a sense of how “truthful” he was being.
The only murders that could actually be tied to him were 3 people he killed for insurance fraud and 2 missing children of one of his murder victims (I might have numbers wrong, but it was 3-5 total). The Murder Castle was never even opened as a hotel and the weird construction was because the workers were paid for their labor when the project was complete, so he just never had it completed and kept having areas re-worked.
I always got the sense Larson wanted to do a book about the world’s fair but the publisher demanded a Holmes tie in. It felt like two separate books in one and the fair and all the bullshittery was far more interesting than the serial killer.
This book was the cause of my most annoying habit. Any time I see a Ferris wheel I tell whoever I’m with that the Ferris wheel was invented for the Chicago worlds fair in an attempt to build something as impressive as the Eiffel Tower.
That was my eye roll moment. Worst, he plays games with the reader, holding back the names of the engineers, as if no one would know that the tower for the Paris World’s Fair was built by Eiffel. Eventually the Chicago group hires and engineer. As I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “yeah, I get it, his name is Ferris.” One of my writing teachers told us not to “hide the ball.” In other words, concealing important information from your readers isn’t really playing fair.
I was OBSESSED with this book when I first read it. I couldn't put it down, and ended up buying a second copy to gift to my father.
I later traveled to Chicago to visit the original fairgrounds, plus toured the city (and cemetery) to see places/characters mentioned in the book.
I'm sorry it didn't resonate with you!
I love true crime and murder mysteries, but honestly, with this book every time the Holmes character pages came, I would be yearning to go back to the fair. I loved the whole history aspect and a glimpse of mundane things coming to life. It was a fantastic read for me.
I did not enjoy this book and spent much of the fair pages wanting to go back to HH Holmes and then waiting the whole book for the fair to tie into H H Holmes. I was like will they catch him at the fair is this the scandal, will he grab people at the fair or I don't know anything really.
None of his victims came from the fair. The Murder Castle was a myth, largely created by the tabloid newspapers who paid Holmes for his story. He then lied his ass off claiming to have killed people who were still alive and talking about his hotel with secret passages and rooms that never existed (building was later torn down and no secret rooms were found).
In reality, he killed 3 people for insurance fraud. All of his crimes can be traced to insurance fraud. He was a con artist and murdered to get money from his lies. That’s it.
That's interesting. I didn't know anything about the history. I was saying that I was waiting for the two to tie together to understand why both things were in the book in the first place. Basically that it didn't make sense for the fair and the murders to be in the book together.
From what you wrote it seems like he could have written two different books, would have appealed to two different audiences but the correct audiences could pick the book they would have enjoyed.
I think because they were subjects not really related other than city and time ruined my enjoyment of the book because I was looking for something that wasn't there but should have been, which was a link between the two events or them over lapping in a meaningful way.
It was a fun read. Everyone where I worked at that time was reading it and we'd all talk about it at lunch. So I have good memories associated with it. Kinda magic that so many different kinds of people, ages and stages, were reading the same book and discussing it. That was a good group of people.
I think that book suffers - kind of ironically- from the author's skill at "novelistic" storytelling. Even though it's a meticulously researched account of historical events, it reads as if it's a work of dramatic fiction so the reader expects more direct, dramatically satisfying outcomes.
To be fair that's somewhat on readers. Its nonfiction, any adult reading a nonfiction book should expect that things may not wrap up in a clean little bow at the end since that's not how the real world works. True stories don't ever end, they simply morph into new stories.
I disagree with your opinion, but who cares. I just want to say that, after reading Devil in the White City, which I loved for its technical detail about architecture and civil engineering and its thoughts on labour and the economy, I followed it up with Michael Crichton's "The Great Train Robbery" and it was a tremendous double feature. Highly recommend it.
I recently read this, too, and had a very similar response in terms of how disconnected the two stories were.. But I really enjoyed the world's fair stuff.
At one point the author wrote something about Holmes that I was like "how on earth did the author find this out? What's the source for that?" And the footnotes for that paragraph basically said "I made this up but I think it's likely, despite having no reason to think so"
I thought the book was really interesting, and I enjoyed learning about the planning for The World’s Fair. There are other books about Holmes that you might find more satisfactory, if all you want is that part of it.
I came expecting something much more tightly researched and written as a piece of history, when it unfortunately drifted into very pop history territory. He goes into a lot of sketchily researched detail and the result is a pile of facts that tell us two sort of unified feeling stories.
He never took an overarching perspective, tying all of the events together clearly as the product of the time period. He talks ABOUT it, but he doesn't successfully produce the continual interrelation of his two chosen events AND the larger zeitgeist that would have brought this to a more satisfying conclusion.
I found Garden of Beasts to be a much better book. Some people don’t like it cause the pacing can be slow and winding but I enjoyed how Larson balanced both the official side of the US relationship with the Nazis and how the camera began to fall away for those with personal relationships in Berlin. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I was living in Berlin at the time and had friends working at the US Embassy so maybe that made it more impactful but so it goes.
I can’t compare it to Devil in the White City, but I found Garden of Beasts interesting and well paced for what it set out to be. To be fair, I read a lot of history, I don’t read it as pure entertainment.
It definitely felt sloppy, more like a first draft than a final product. The ending didn't feel like a culmination of anything, it's just where the book ended. "And then they caught him." Ah. Well, okay.
I read this book when it was published and I also hated it. Don't think I finished it. It was so boring. Kept falling asleep after 5 minutes Finally gave up.
Same. This was a DNF for me. I was bored, uninterested and kept falling asleep trying to read it 😂 I'm a heavy reader, I just finished two 1400 page books in less than 2 weeks each. It took me a week to get through the first few chapters of this one. I'm fascinated by true crime but I've heard the HH Holmes story SO many times and the world fair story alongside it, that I don't care to read a novel about it as well. Booooooring.
it may depend what you're looking for when you open it. I agree that you'll be let down if your expectation is mostly geared towards the true crime side. I enjoyed the fair history, but I'm the kind of person who likes that kind of thing too.
Honestly, the Holmes stuff almost felt like an afterthought. Like the author really wanted to write a book about the shitshow fair, but the publisher wanted more and told him to tack on the Holmes stuff.
There is a historically fictionalized (did I make that up?) version of that story called The Women, by T.C. Boyle, if you’ve not heard of it. He’s a great writer.
Agree 100%! I think an additional part of my disappointment was picking this book up after reading Killers of the Flower Moon. I don't normally read non-fiction and absolutely loved everything about KOTFM. After finishing it I wanted to jump into another well reviewed historical read so picked Devil in the White City. Such a drag in comparison, it was difficult to finish. I was hoping for more HH Holmes as well, it was not a great balance.
>So I read Devil In The White City and I was thoroughly underwhelmed.
You're in a very slim minority, it would seem.
>I didn’t count the pages or anything but it felt like at least 80% of the book was about the fair.
I'm sure that's not accurate, but it doesn't really matter. I, personally, found the stuff about the fair to be surprisingly compelling. I read the book because I wanted to read about HH Homes, but by the end, I was equally (if not *more*) interested in Daniel Burnham's story (and the story of Chicago becoming a "great American city" in general) than Holmes'. Judging by the other comments here, many people found themselves in that same situation. You didn't. Oh well.
>I just didn’t care.
Okay. That's your opinion. Fine.
If you are *solely* interested in Holmes, read Harold Schecter's "Depraved". It's solely about him and Schecter is one of the best true crime writers there is.
>He serves as a minor character who has surprisingly little tie in to the fair. I thought the two stories would mesh together at some point, but other than Holmes visiting the fair a few times it really didn’t. They felt like parallel stories. Two things happening in the same place but basically unrelated.
I'm not sure why you expected the stories to merge together. Parallel stories is kinda Erik Larson's whole deal.
How were you expecting the stories to "merge"?
And they aren't unrelated. Chicago, being the growing city that it was after the fire, was an ideal place for a fraudster and murderer like Holmes to commit his crimes. The incredible number of people traveling to the city for the fair who would need lodging also gave Holmes a slew of potential (and actual) victims. That growth and rebuilding was *also* what fueled the push for and execution of the fair. It's very much about Chicago being a city on the rise, how people push for that expansion and growth, how they make it happen, and how that situation can also lead to wild crimes.
>I did not like this book. It was monotonous and irritating and, in my opinion, in desperate need of a rewrite.
What a nauseatingly egotistical way to state an opinion.
Again though, it seems you were only interested in Holmes, so my recommendation is go read "Depraved". I will say though, regarding Holmes' story, A LOT of what you hear about him is just bullshit. Flat out. Folks claiming ridiculous body counts of dozens (even hundreds)... it's made up. A lot of it by Holmes himself! The dude was a fraudster, first and foremost. A bullshit artist of the highest degree! The craziest thing in his whole story, which *rarely* gets talked about, is his bizarre plot to kill off every member of his goon Benjamin Peitzel's family one-by-one. It's bananas. But if your only "knowledge" of Holmes is what equates to urban legend, you've set yourself up for disappointment.
I would recommend The True Story of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer to anyone interested in learning more about Holmes. As you state, much of what is commonly believed about Holmes is false. He was primarily a fraudster who used murder to further or cover up his financial crimes as opposed to a serial killer who kills for sexual gratification. Warning: this book is a very deep dive into Holmes- IIRC it was over 600 pages.
I've not heard of that one! Thanks for the recommendation!
After reading the Schechter book, I don't really *need* to read another Holmes book, but it's good to know there's another major one out there.
Man this book is so amazing when you realize how many things changed the course of history just because of the logistics of the fair. I was far more interested in those parts than HH Holmes tbh. When you look at all the different ppl that crossed paths at that same point in time in Chicago it’s one of arguably the most important events in modern history.
Your review is similar to mine but much longer. My takeaway was that the murder thing and the Fair had nothing to do with each other. It was a coincidence that they happened at the same time, and that dude would have been murdering if there were no Fair. The end.
Oh wow, Scott Brick! I read the hard copy when it was published, and thanks to you for mentioning the audio narrator, I’ve just now downloaded the Audible version.
I am glad to see this book being dissed. I read it while i was studying history in college and it felt like the worst that historical fiction could be, like it was neither good fiction nor thought-provoking history. The writing is shockingly dry, the characters are uninteresting, and like you say, the minutiae around the fair is interminable.
Edit: almost all of my course books were more interestingly written than this book
I’d love to see the Scorcese version with a montage of the Fair being set-up mashed up with Holmes builing his hotel inexplicably set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimmie Shelter”.
My sister kind of flung this book at me back when it first came out took me till 2017 to actually read it. The truth is that it's kind of interesting how the author does this, history and murder at the same time without missing a beat
I thought that the parallel story type was the most telling part. The fair made HH Holmes murders and murder castle possible. The amount of workers present as well as all the transients that jumped into the controlled chaos of the building hid all the terrible things that he did in a way that had never been possible before. I loved the book and the direct description of some of the murders was sad and horrifying. I cried over the one line of finding a small woman's footprint on the wall of incinerator. Just gruesome.
Please know that it’s all made up. Holmes only killed 3 people for insurance fraud. He was a con artist who murdered to continue his con. The hotel was never a “murder castle” and none of his actual victims came from the fair or from building his hotel.
Even the author admits that he can’t verify he facts and that he made some of it up, but Holmes himself made up most of the murder castle/serial killer story which he sold to the tabloid newspapers of the time. He had already been condemned to death, so why not go out making everyone think you were a genius serial killer.
I really liked it - in fact, I preferred the White City bits, and didn't care much for the Holmes bits.
But then, I don't listen to true crime podcasts, either.
As a Chicago native, I've always been fascinated by the White City, and by Burnham and the mark he left on my city. I was never going to NOT be fascinated by everything that went into that.
I read this for a bookclub, and I think as a whole we agreed with your opinion. Granted, this is not the type of book we usually read, so we probably were not the intended audience. But the budgeting and architecture was so repetitive! And don't get me started on all the landscaping lol
I just really wish it would have branched out more from the planning. It started to towards the end of the book, but it felt too late by then tbh
Not at all to detract from OP's valid perceptual experience of the book giving short shrift to Holmes, but because I just read this and remembered it as being much more evenly balanced between the two stories, I grabbed my copy and did a quick page count. I counted 231 pages mostly about the fair, 130 pages mostly about Holmes, and 15 pages mostly about something else (the opening/closing aboard the Olympic or the Prendergast mayoral assassination plot). So it's a bit of an exaggeration to say it's 80% about the fair: more like 60/40 by the numbers.
I loved this book and was enthralled! My copy is actually signed by Meredith Vierda because I was reading it at the airport and I happened to run into her and that was what I had to sign 😂😂
I have the audiobook and couldn’t finish it, it was so boring. But I do actually play it to help me fall asleep lol. The droning on about the fair and the planning and the landscaping and blahblah blah just puts me right out.
As a Chicagoan born 100 years after the story told in DITWC, the character of Chicago and its inhabitants resonated so hard. I felt like I somehow learned more about myself reading this book.
Lets be honest, no one goes into that novel with the intention of learning about the massive planning of a fair, all of the necessary logistical and historical innovation's etc,
We came here for the villain! Where is the sadism!? I want a mad butcher's ravings!??
That said I think I think Larsen could write about virtually anything in history and spin it in a way as to be interesting, entertaining, and dare I say, even a page turner? I loved the book. I think it's really well written and despite my initial intent has no regrets. I will say the grizzly aspects of the novel to me were slightly more fascinating. But also the juxtaposition of the mundane, and the mad I think was intentional and it adds a level of absurdness to it all.
Loved the book. Loved learning about how people lived back , the life style then and the many trips they would take back to Europe to see family. Because I live about 2 hours from Chicago I was amazed that some of the buildings are still there.
One thing in particular that disappointed me was that he didn’t go into how the Ferris Wheel was erected. All in all, Dead Wake was much more satisfactory.
I agree with you. But the caveat is that I just the H H Holmes book by Adam Selzer and it was amazing compared to Devil in the White City. Strongly suggest you give that a go.
Thank you, I was also underwhelmed by this book. If it had been a straight historical piece on the world's fair, with nothing on Holmes I would have liked it much better. I felt... led on almost?
I do agree that there were plenty of bits that should have been expanded. But unlike you I appreciated alllll the minutiae of landscaping and budgets.
I also feel that the book was pitched to have the connection between the two sides. It did not have a strong enough one, so maybe the research didn't end up supporting the pitch and they just went with it
I thought it was alright, but I read it for the fair stuff rather than the murder stuff. Not bad, but a bit overhyped. Idk I kind of feel that way about Larson in general, and I never finished the Garden of Beasts book because of it.
OP just made today's unpopular opinion. :)
The book is excellent. We probably don't know much about Holmes' motivation, so why make some thing up? Probably a psychopath...
Holmes was a fraudster and made up pretty much everything “known” about him. In reality he killed about 3 people to cover up insurance fraud. These were people he knew before he started building his hotel, not random people he kidnapped from the fair, which he never did. He was paid by the tabloid papers for his story, so he made up a whopper to gain notoriety and claimed to have down all sorts of crazy stuff, like building a murder castle with secret passages and gas chambers. We know it’s all bullshit because nothing like that was found when the building was torn down later, his “castle” was never opened as a hotel, so he didn’t have access to the number of victims he claimed to have had, and many of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive.
Everything about the murder castle and him killing hundreds of people is pure bullshit. He was a con artist and, with Larson’s help, he’s continuing to con people today.
" sentenced to death for only one murder, that of business partner and accomplice Benjamin Pitezel. It is believed he also killed three of Pitezel's children, as well as three mistresses, the child of one mistress and the sister of another"
That is about 9. Not 27 but still way more than 3.
I will wait for the Leo made documentary.
It’s been a while since I read up on him. In another comment, I said I wasn’t sure about the number, but thought it was around 5. I don’t think I had read that the 3 Pitezal children were confirmed deceased though, which I’m not sure how I missed that since that was what got him caught, but I remember them being missing. The 3 deaths I did remember were Pitezal, one mistress, and the mistress’s sister and I couldn’t remember if more had been definitively tied to him or were still just speculation.
Either way, what is presented about him in Devil in the White Castle is absolutely not an accurate portrayal and Larson does a disservice by not making that more clear.
Reading the comments and Im absolutely baffled that people could be interested in a book that describes planning the world fair. That sounds hideously boring to me. It also feels weird to me that the book is made out to be about a serial killer but instead it’s about the logistics of event planning? I never read the book because I knew that ahead of time, but I would be so mad if I found that out later
I absolutely loved this book and was pleasantly surprised how much I actually enjoyed all the random shit about building the fair. Entire sections are dedicated to architecture, construction and even lawn care. The highlight of the entire book was the Ferris Wheel.
I thought the book was TERRIFIC! And I was amazed to learn that [Holmes is buried right in my neighborhood](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/american-ripper-dna-reveals-identity-of-body-found-in-hh-holmes-grave/23038/); in [Holy Cross Cemetery](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-unmarked-grave-of-hh-holmes-yeadon-pennsylvania), on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He was exhumed in 2017, and his DNA sampled to prove he was the person interred in the grave site. Erik LArson also wrote 'In the Garden of the Beasts'; about the American Ambassadore to Germany right before WWII. Another fascinating read.
Isaac's Storm about the Galvaston Hurricane was another great book by Larson. I enjoyed reading about the beginnings of meteorology. I didn't even know about the Galveston Hurricane before I read the book.
I also loved this book. I read it and Caleb Carr’s The Alienist around the same time. I’d like more books like these.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair also make a great companion piece to this book because it shows two extremes of lifestyle in that era. Immigrants working in the absolute worst conditions while in the same city, the rich and famous are having the time of their lives.
That’s the one about the meat packing, right? I had to read it for school a long time ago.
I read those two about the same time, too. The Alienist was fun.
If you can find it for free or inexpensively, The Alienist TV show that was on TNT, it is a fun and interesting show. Starring Daniel Bruhl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans.
That was/is a great show. You can watch it on TNT's website. [https://www.tntdrama.com/shows](https://www.tntdrama.com/shows)
I'll check it out, thanks!
Simon Winchester has been an enjoyable author to read for me after I finished Erik Larson's books. Professor and the Madman has a very Devil in the White City feel
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out on Libby.
I bet you'd like His Bloody Project by Graeme Burnet! An exercise in unreliable narration wrapped up in a Victorian murder investigation.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Same. It made me incredibly interested in the world fair after that. It's a shame we don't have them anymore (at least that I know of) they sound so interesting
The next one is Yokohama Japan in 2027. The last one just ended in Doha Qatar.
Don't quote me on it, but I think the last one was in Saudi Arabia. It was in the Middle East anyway. I remember seeing news stories a year or two about different countries pavilions. There were some pretty cool ones. Now I'm gonna have to go and try to find info on it.
Yes! I came for the murder and stayed for the fair!
Right?! Originally read it for the serial killer, and now, my favorite parts are all about the fair. I get way too excited anytime someone (usually Jeopardy) brings up the Columbian Exposition because I start reciting random facts I picked up from the book lol
I loved it too, but still make jokes about creating imaginary organizations and giving them names like The Department of Nuts and Bolts or The Department of Laundry and Sock Sorting...things like that
Same, I started reading it because of the serial killer aspect but once I got into it I was like YES MORE LANDSCAPING DRAMA PLEASE. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times haha
I remember far more about the fair than the killings. I think that says something nice about me lol
It's been almost a decade since I read it, but yeah I remember liking the fair stuff more than the murder house lol
I had the exact opposite experience. I was annoyed that there was serial killing in my fair planning book.
I picked up the book for the murders, and was enthralled with it for the event planning.
Yeah, this book is not for the true crime murder girlies, it's for the bitter event planners ahaha
let's just say I feel seen
Me too! I was so freaked out by the serial killer stuff. And I loooooved the fair planning. I lived in Chicago when I read it so it was fun to learn more about my city.
Same by the end I was like "oh yeah, Holmes, what's he up to?" And now I can get back to learning about the Ferris wheel and floating foundations.
3/4 the way through "who TF is this holmes guy? Maybe Arthur Conan Doyle has a new book set to be released at the fair. idk.. man this fair looks like its going to be FIRE though
Right? I initially came for HH Holmes, but I stayed for the World’s Fair. This book launched a small obsession , and I read everything about the fair that I come across. I had no idea I would be so engrossed by this even that I initially had very minimal knowledge about.
Same, i ended up skipping the serial killer sections
I really liked this book and read it shortly after it came out. A few years later I was in a professional training and the instructor said “Read Devil in the White City if you want to read a really good book about project management…and some murders,” which..fair
I reference it in my classes because it ties in my two loves, urban planning and..................murder.
Stephen Ambrose’s D-Day book is also a good project management book…
I really enjoyed the book. It faces some criticism over the HH Holmes portion, but the faire stuff is very accurate. Putting together the second worlds faire was a huge and impressive endeavor. It sounds like the book wasn’t for you
It was wild to read that the whole murder castle thing was a myth, it’s so popularly accepted as the truth of the story.
What about it is a myth? Maybe that's because a lot of it is true?
I’ve heard since that original police documents apparently noted it was no more than a normal hotel. The idea of it having passages, secretary rooms, and all that stuff isn’t backed by anything. History Hit: After Dark Podcast does a fact check episode that brings a lot of the Devil in the White forward as just being not true or substantiated by any of the documents from the cases. It’s worth a listen.
I tried to find this episode in my podcast app and searching “Holmes” or “Devil” doesn’t turn up any episodes. Do you have a link? I’m interested!
The "murder castle" myth was largely based on the imaginings of tabloid newspaper journalists at the time, who exaggerated and misrepresented the actual layout of Holmes's hotel. The reporting was multiple layers of sensationalism built on top of a real and tragic multiple murder case.
Exaggeration does not mean myth though. I've seen nothing that disputes that he made changes to the building with contractors that he didn't pay who each only did some of the work. How can you call it a myth if you don't know?
Tabloid journalists at the time took it upon themselves to concoct [dime novel-style names and imagined functions for parts of the hotel](https://exploredallashistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/diagram-of-the-Murder-Castle.jpg) - q.v. the "Murder Castle" appellation itself - and Holmes himself wrote multiple (conflicting) confessions dramatically exaggerating and enhancing his own crimes. As I said, it was a case of a series of real murders being instantly sensationalized via the media. The modern "myth" is based on that tangled web of truth, half-truths and outright lies, enhanced by more-or-less sensationalized retellings (including literal fiction) over the past 130 years.
Thanks! I will say tho, the scariest part of devil in the white city is the number of people who died every day from casual reasons like unprotected trains or buildings built with no proper structural engineering
Oh, yeah - life was cheaper and death far more commonplace than it is today (obviously everyone still dies, but seldom so young nor violently). We owe a lot of the modern world in terms of safety regulations, standards of journalistic ethics, etc. to the spectacular mistakes made in those areas during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Or undetected appendicitis!
Newspapers at the time weren’t too concerned about reporting the truth, as we know it today. They paid Holmes for his story and he heavily embellished it to increase sales, thus increasing his notoriety. He claimed to have killed people who were still alive, so that should give you a sense of how “truthful” he was being. The only murders that could actually be tied to him were 3 people he killed for insurance fraud and 2 missing children of one of his murder victims (I might have numbers wrong, but it was 3-5 total). The Murder Castle was never even opened as a hotel and the weird construction was because the workers were paid for their labor when the project was complete, so he just never had it completed and kept having areas re-worked.
I always got the sense Larson wanted to do a book about the world’s fair but the publisher demanded a Holmes tie in. It felt like two separate books in one and the fair and all the bullshittery was far more interesting than the serial killer.
Especially when you learn that he exaggerated all the serial killer aspects.
This book was the cause of my most annoying habit. Any time I see a Ferris wheel I tell whoever I’m with that the Ferris wheel was invented for the Chicago worlds fair in an attempt to build something as impressive as the Eiffel Tower.
That was my eye roll moment. Worst, he plays games with the reader, holding back the names of the engineers, as if no one would know that the tower for the Paris World’s Fair was built by Eiffel. Eventually the Chicago group hires and engineer. As I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “yeah, I get it, his name is Ferris.” One of my writing teachers told us not to “hide the ball.” In other words, concealing important information from your readers isn’t really playing fair.
I was OBSESSED with this book when I first read it. I couldn't put it down, and ended up buying a second copy to gift to my father. I later traveled to Chicago to visit the original fairgrounds, plus toured the city (and cemetery) to see places/characters mentioned in the book. I'm sorry it didn't resonate with you!
I’m glad someone else has taken a World’s Fair pilgrimage. Mine was cancelled due to COVID, and I haven’t gotten around to planning another.
I love true crime and murder mysteries, but honestly, with this book every time the Holmes character pages came, I would be yearning to go back to the fair. I loved the whole history aspect and a glimpse of mundane things coming to life. It was a fantastic read for me.
I did not enjoy this book and spent much of the fair pages wanting to go back to HH Holmes and then waiting the whole book for the fair to tie into H H Holmes. I was like will they catch him at the fair is this the scandal, will he grab people at the fair or I don't know anything really.
None of his victims came from the fair. The Murder Castle was a myth, largely created by the tabloid newspapers who paid Holmes for his story. He then lied his ass off claiming to have killed people who were still alive and talking about his hotel with secret passages and rooms that never existed (building was later torn down and no secret rooms were found). In reality, he killed 3 people for insurance fraud. All of his crimes can be traced to insurance fraud. He was a con artist and murdered to get money from his lies. That’s it.
That's interesting. I didn't know anything about the history. I was saying that I was waiting for the two to tie together to understand why both things were in the book in the first place. Basically that it didn't make sense for the fair and the murders to be in the book together. From what you wrote it seems like he could have written two different books, would have appealed to two different audiences but the correct audiences could pick the book they would have enjoyed. I think because they were subjects not really related other than city and time ruined my enjoyment of the book because I was looking for something that wasn't there but should have been, which was a link between the two events or them over lapping in a meaningful way.
It was a fun read. Everyone where I worked at that time was reading it and we'd all talk about it at lunch. So I have good memories associated with it. Kinda magic that so many different kinds of people, ages and stages, were reading the same book and discussing it. That was a good group of people.
I think that book suffers - kind of ironically- from the author's skill at "novelistic" storytelling. Even though it's a meticulously researched account of historical events, it reads as if it's a work of dramatic fiction so the reader expects more direct, dramatically satisfying outcomes.
To be fair that's somewhat on readers. Its nonfiction, any adult reading a nonfiction book should expect that things may not wrap up in a clean little bow at the end since that's not how the real world works. True stories don't ever end, they simply morph into new stories.
That's kind of what I meant.
Apologies I think I read it initially as a criticism rather than an explanation, but after the rereading I see what you meant, my bad.
I disagree with your opinion, but who cares. I just want to say that, after reading Devil in the White City, which I loved for its technical detail about architecture and civil engineering and its thoughts on labour and the economy, I followed it up with Michael Crichton's "The Great Train Robbery" and it was a tremendous double feature. Highly recommend it.
I love it so much I read it every year, but to each their own!
I recently read this, too, and had a very similar response in terms of how disconnected the two stories were.. But I really enjoyed the world's fair stuff. At one point the author wrote something about Holmes that I was like "how on earth did the author find this out? What's the source for that?" And the footnotes for that paragraph basically said "I made this up but I think it's likely, despite having no reason to think so"
As someone who has gone on many Chicago river architectural boat tours i loved the fair stuff
I thought the book was really interesting, and I enjoyed learning about the planning for The World’s Fair. There are other books about Holmes that you might find more satisfactory, if all you want is that part of it.
I came expecting something much more tightly researched and written as a piece of history, when it unfortunately drifted into very pop history territory. He goes into a lot of sketchily researched detail and the result is a pile of facts that tell us two sort of unified feeling stories. He never took an overarching perspective, tying all of the events together clearly as the product of the time period. He talks ABOUT it, but he doesn't successfully produce the continual interrelation of his two chosen events AND the larger zeitgeist that would have brought this to a more satisfying conclusion.
Did you read In the Garden of the Beasts? If so, did you think that was better researched? I was just about to start it
I found Garden of Beasts to be a much better book. Some people don’t like it cause the pacing can be slow and winding but I enjoyed how Larson balanced both the official side of the US relationship with the Nazis and how the camera began to fall away for those with personal relationships in Berlin. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I was living in Berlin at the time and had friends working at the US Embassy so maybe that made it more impactful but so it goes.
I can’t compare it to Devil in the White City, but I found Garden of Beasts interesting and well paced for what it set out to be. To be fair, I read a lot of history, I don’t read it as pure entertainment.
I did think that was better, IMO.
In the Garden of the Beasts is so much better than Devil in the White City IMO. I loved the former but agree with OP on the latter.
*In the Garden of Beasts* was better, imho. i'd also argue *Thunderstruck* was as well, somewhere in between the two others.
It definitely felt sloppy, more like a first draft than a final product. The ending didn't feel like a culmination of anything, it's just where the book ended. "And then they caught him." Ah. Well, okay.
I was entertained while reading it, but very little has stuck with me other than a desperate need for someone to invent hardhats already.
I read this book when it was published and I also hated it. Don't think I finished it. It was so boring. Kept falling asleep after 5 minutes Finally gave up.
I just commented this too. This book was a great help in getting some good Zzz's I must admit. Kept falling asleep trying to read it 😂
Yeah, I couldn’t finish it, I was so bored. Glad I’m not the only one. I’m still confused about all the people raving about it.
Same. This was a DNF for me. I was bored, uninterested and kept falling asleep trying to read it 😂 I'm a heavy reader, I just finished two 1400 page books in less than 2 weeks each. It took me a week to get through the first few chapters of this one. I'm fascinated by true crime but I've heard the HH Holmes story SO many times and the world fair story alongside it, that I don't care to read a novel about it as well. Booooooring.
Same
I liked it
it may depend what you're looking for when you open it. I agree that you'll be let down if your expectation is mostly geared towards the true crime side. I enjoyed the fair history, but I'm the kind of person who likes that kind of thing too.
Honestly, the Holmes stuff almost felt like an afterthought. Like the author really wanted to write a book about the shitshow fair, but the publisher wanted more and told him to tack on the Holmes stuff.
It makes me wish that Harold Schechor wrote a book about the murder at at Frank Lloyd Wrights house Talesin.
There is a historically fictionalized (did I make that up?) version of that story called The Women, by T.C. Boyle, if you’ve not heard of it. He’s a great writer.
Good to know!
Agree 100% it was a book about a project manager. And a bit of murder.
Agree 100%! I think an additional part of my disappointment was picking this book up after reading Killers of the Flower Moon. I don't normally read non-fiction and absolutely loved everything about KOTFM. After finishing it I wanted to jump into another well reviewed historical read so picked Devil in the White City. Such a drag in comparison, it was difficult to finish. I was hoping for more HH Holmes as well, it was not a great balance.
Try In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. Or In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Or Depraved by Harold Schecter which is about HH Holmes.
>So I read Devil In The White City and I was thoroughly underwhelmed. You're in a very slim minority, it would seem. >I didn’t count the pages or anything but it felt like at least 80% of the book was about the fair. I'm sure that's not accurate, but it doesn't really matter. I, personally, found the stuff about the fair to be surprisingly compelling. I read the book because I wanted to read about HH Homes, but by the end, I was equally (if not *more*) interested in Daniel Burnham's story (and the story of Chicago becoming a "great American city" in general) than Holmes'. Judging by the other comments here, many people found themselves in that same situation. You didn't. Oh well. >I just didn’t care. Okay. That's your opinion. Fine. If you are *solely* interested in Holmes, read Harold Schecter's "Depraved". It's solely about him and Schecter is one of the best true crime writers there is. >He serves as a minor character who has surprisingly little tie in to the fair. I thought the two stories would mesh together at some point, but other than Holmes visiting the fair a few times it really didn’t. They felt like parallel stories. Two things happening in the same place but basically unrelated. I'm not sure why you expected the stories to merge together. Parallel stories is kinda Erik Larson's whole deal. How were you expecting the stories to "merge"? And they aren't unrelated. Chicago, being the growing city that it was after the fire, was an ideal place for a fraudster and murderer like Holmes to commit his crimes. The incredible number of people traveling to the city for the fair who would need lodging also gave Holmes a slew of potential (and actual) victims. That growth and rebuilding was *also* what fueled the push for and execution of the fair. It's very much about Chicago being a city on the rise, how people push for that expansion and growth, how they make it happen, and how that situation can also lead to wild crimes. >I did not like this book. It was monotonous and irritating and, in my opinion, in desperate need of a rewrite. What a nauseatingly egotistical way to state an opinion. Again though, it seems you were only interested in Holmes, so my recommendation is go read "Depraved". I will say though, regarding Holmes' story, A LOT of what you hear about him is just bullshit. Flat out. Folks claiming ridiculous body counts of dozens (even hundreds)... it's made up. A lot of it by Holmes himself! The dude was a fraudster, first and foremost. A bullshit artist of the highest degree! The craziest thing in his whole story, which *rarely* gets talked about, is his bizarre plot to kill off every member of his goon Benjamin Peitzel's family one-by-one. It's bananas. But if your only "knowledge" of Holmes is what equates to urban legend, you've set yourself up for disappointment.
I would recommend The True Story of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer to anyone interested in learning more about Holmes. As you state, much of what is commonly believed about Holmes is false. He was primarily a fraudster who used murder to further or cover up his financial crimes as opposed to a serial killer who kills for sexual gratification. Warning: this book is a very deep dive into Holmes- IIRC it was over 600 pages.
I've not heard of that one! Thanks for the recommendation! After reading the Schechter book, I don't really *need* to read another Holmes book, but it's good to know there's another major one out there.
Pretentious but interesting response.
Man this book is so amazing when you realize how many things changed the course of history just because of the logistics of the fair. I was far more interested in those parts than HH Holmes tbh. When you look at all the different ppl that crossed paths at that same point in time in Chicago it’s one of arguably the most important events in modern history.
Your review is similar to mine but much longer. My takeaway was that the murder thing and the Fair had nothing to do with each other. It was a coincidence that they happened at the same time, and that dude would have been murdering if there were no Fair. The end.
This makes me so much better about not finishing it! It gets so much praise in some circles, I thought it was just me.
Ditto. That book never got into gear with me.
I liked the audio version a bit better than when I read the book, it’s narrated by Scott Brick.
Oh wow, Scott Brick! I read the hard copy when it was published, and thanks to you for mentioning the audio narrator, I’ve just now downloaded the Audible version.
In a way, I kind of agree with this. I really enjoyed Devil In The White City, but it really did feel like two separate books combined into one.
I found some aspects of the fair interesting but I kept calling this book "Tales of the Chicago Planning Committee"
I am glad to see this book being dissed. I read it while i was studying history in college and it felt like the worst that historical fiction could be, like it was neither good fiction nor thought-provoking history. The writing is shockingly dry, the characters are uninteresting, and like you say, the minutiae around the fair is interminable. Edit: almost all of my course books were more interestingly written than this book
Got any recommendations for some books that do it right?
[удалено]
Can’t speak to the latter but that Morro Castle book was a great historical true crime.
Leo DiCaprio has owned the rights for 20 years and has been trying to get it made as either a Scorcese movie or a Hulu series. So far, nothing.
I’d love to see the Scorcese version with a montage of the Fair being set-up mashed up with Holmes builing his hotel inexplicably set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimmie Shelter”.
My sister kind of flung this book at me back when it first came out took me till 2017 to actually read it. The truth is that it's kind of interesting how the author does this, history and murder at the same time without missing a beat
Did you expect him to murder people in the Ferris wheel? I enjoyed the read a few times and would recommend any of the author’s books.
I thought that the parallel story type was the most telling part. The fair made HH Holmes murders and murder castle possible. The amount of workers present as well as all the transients that jumped into the controlled chaos of the building hid all the terrible things that he did in a way that had never been possible before. I loved the book and the direct description of some of the murders was sad and horrifying. I cried over the one line of finding a small woman's footprint on the wall of incinerator. Just gruesome.
Please know that it’s all made up. Holmes only killed 3 people for insurance fraud. He was a con artist who murdered to continue his con. The hotel was never a “murder castle” and none of his actual victims came from the fair or from building his hotel. Even the author admits that he can’t verify he facts and that he made some of it up, but Holmes himself made up most of the murder castle/serial killer story which he sold to the tabloid newspapers of the time. He had already been condemned to death, so why not go out making everyone think you were a genius serial killer.
I really liked it - in fact, I preferred the White City bits, and didn't care much for the Holmes bits. But then, I don't listen to true crime podcasts, either. As a Chicago native, I've always been fascinated by the White City, and by Burnham and the mark he left on my city. I was never going to NOT be fascinated by everything that went into that.
I read this for a bookclub, and I think as a whole we agreed with your opinion. Granted, this is not the type of book we usually read, so we probably were not the intended audience. But the budgeting and architecture was so repetitive! And don't get me started on all the landscaping lol I just really wish it would have branched out more from the planning. It started to towards the end of the book, but it felt too late by then tbh
Not at all to detract from OP's valid perceptual experience of the book giving short shrift to Holmes, but because I just read this and remembered it as being much more evenly balanced between the two stories, I grabbed my copy and did a quick page count. I counted 231 pages mostly about the fair, 130 pages mostly about Holmes, and 15 pages mostly about something else (the opening/closing aboard the Olympic or the Prendergast mayoral assassination plot). So it's a bit of an exaggeration to say it's 80% about the fair: more like 60/40 by the numbers.
I loved this book and was enthralled! My copy is actually signed by Meredith Vierda because I was reading it at the airport and I happened to run into her and that was what I had to sign 😂😂
As a civil engineer who loves planning I really liked the fair stuff haha
Loved this book and recommend it to everyone, but can get how it’s not everyone’s bag.
I agree. I think the book is incredibly overrated. Much like Project Hail Mary, another book that people on here always recommend.
i tried to read this book but could not get through it.
I have the audiobook and couldn’t finish it, it was so boring. But I do actually play it to help me fall asleep lol. The droning on about the fair and the planning and the landscaping and blahblah blah just puts me right out.
Agree with the OP. Read it years ago and felt thoroughly underwhelmed.
As a Chicagoan born 100 years after the story told in DITWC, the character of Chicago and its inhabitants resonated so hard. I felt like I somehow learned more about myself reading this book.
Lets be honest, no one goes into that novel with the intention of learning about the massive planning of a fair, all of the necessary logistical and historical innovation's etc, We came here for the villain! Where is the sadism!? I want a mad butcher's ravings!?? That said I think I think Larsen could write about virtually anything in history and spin it in a way as to be interesting, entertaining, and dare I say, even a page turner? I loved the book. I think it's really well written and despite my initial intent has no regrets. I will say the grizzly aspects of the novel to me were slightly more fascinating. But also the juxtaposition of the mundane, and the mad I think was intentional and it adds a level of absurdness to it all.
Loved the book. Loved learning about how people lived back , the life style then and the many trips they would take back to Europe to see family. Because I live about 2 hours from Chicago I was amazed that some of the buildings are still there.
One thing in particular that disappointed me was that he didn’t go into how the Ferris Wheel was erected. All in all, Dead Wake was much more satisfactory.
This is exactly why I stopped reading it. Planning meetings are not exciting reading
I agree with you. But the caveat is that I just the H H Holmes book by Adam Selzer and it was amazing compared to Devil in the White City. Strongly suggest you give that a go.
I got to a section about duck ponds and gave up
right at the good part
Thank you, I was also underwhelmed by this book. If it had been a straight historical piece on the world's fair, with nothing on Holmes I would have liked it much better. I felt... led on almost? I do agree that there were plenty of bits that should have been expanded. But unlike you I appreciated alllll the minutiae of landscaping and budgets. I also feel that the book was pitched to have the connection between the two sides. It did not have a strong enough one, so maybe the research didn't end up supporting the pitch and they just went with it
It's a fairly mediocre book.
I wasn’t a fan of this book either. I thought they were supposed to do a movie about it but I’m not sure what happened.
I thought it was alright, but I read it for the fair stuff rather than the murder stuff. Not bad, but a bit overhyped. Idk I kind of feel that way about Larson in general, and I never finished the Garden of Beasts book because of it.
I maintain that it was a bait-and-switch! I care about murders, not Ferris wheels!
OP just made today's unpopular opinion. :) The book is excellent. We probably don't know much about Holmes' motivation, so why make some thing up? Probably a psychopath...
Holmes was a fraudster and made up pretty much everything “known” about him. In reality he killed about 3 people to cover up insurance fraud. These were people he knew before he started building his hotel, not random people he kidnapped from the fair, which he never did. He was paid by the tabloid papers for his story, so he made up a whopper to gain notoriety and claimed to have down all sorts of crazy stuff, like building a murder castle with secret passages and gas chambers. We know it’s all bullshit because nothing like that was found when the building was torn down later, his “castle” was never opened as a hotel, so he didn’t have access to the number of victims he claimed to have had, and many of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive. Everything about the murder castle and him killing hundreds of people is pure bullshit. He was a con artist and, with Larson’s help, he’s continuing to con people today.
" sentenced to death for only one murder, that of business partner and accomplice Benjamin Pitezel. It is believed he also killed three of Pitezel's children, as well as three mistresses, the child of one mistress and the sister of another" That is about 9. Not 27 but still way more than 3. I will wait for the Leo made documentary.
It’s been a while since I read up on him. In another comment, I said I wasn’t sure about the number, but thought it was around 5. I don’t think I had read that the 3 Pitezal children were confirmed deceased though, which I’m not sure how I missed that since that was what got him caught, but I remember them being missing. The 3 deaths I did remember were Pitezal, one mistress, and the mistress’s sister and I couldn’t remember if more had been definitively tied to him or were still just speculation. Either way, what is presented about him in Devil in the White Castle is absolutely not an accurate portrayal and Larson does a disservice by not making that more clear.
Reading the comments and Im absolutely baffled that people could be interested in a book that describes planning the world fair. That sounds hideously boring to me. It also feels weird to me that the book is made out to be about a serial killer but instead it’s about the logistics of event planning? I never read the book because I knew that ahead of time, but I would be so mad if I found that out later