The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Ferris wheel was meant to be a surprise for readers. At one point, he owned up to murdering 27 people, a few of whom weren’t even dead. We’ll never get a definitive answer: Holmes was frustratingly fickle in his confessions. “Based on my research, I think that’s too extraordinary,” Larson told Identity Theory, explaining that he thinks “several dozen” is probably closer to the mark. It was also the New York World-a bastion of yellow journalism-that suggested Holmes had murdered some 200 people. Larson doesn’t think Holmes killed hundreds of people. The hurricane was the subject of an article in an old issue of the New York World that Larson was reading while hunting for a good murder to write about. Published in 1999, Isaac’s Storm chronicles the story of a hurricane that killed thousands of people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. That said, the progression didn’t happen overnight: Larson wrote a whole other book between reading The Alienist and landing on the final idea for The Devil in the White City. Larson’s research for this book led him to the idea for Isaac’s Storm. It was “this monument to darkness and this monument to civic goodwill juxtaposed against one another.” 3. Being a “passionate chewer” of Juicy Fruit himself, Larson was struck by the fair’s lasting influence on modern-day society, and he realized the book he wanted to write wasn’t just about the fair or Holmes’s nearby murders. “This was the specific trigger … the fulcrum on which my life subsequently spun,” Larson said.

One footnote mentioned that Juicy Fruit gum debuted at the fair. He started researching that, instead-paying special attention to the footnotes of books, “because that’s where the good stuff, frankly, usually is,” he explained in a WSJ+ Books talk.

… And Juicy Fruit gum inspired his focus on the 1893 World’s Fair.īut while reading about Holmes, Larson did come across a reference to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive world’s fair in Chicago that attracted some 27 million visitors over a six-month period. Holmes, Larson initially dismissed him “because he was so over-the-top bad, and I did not want to do a slasher book,” as he said in a 2003 C-SPAN interview.

The story-particularly its immersive setting-prompted Larson to consider writing about a real-life murder from the era, so he borrowed an Encyclopedia of Murder from the library and started looking for a suitable candidate. In 1994, Larson read Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, a bestselling novel from that year about a psychiatrist who investigates murders in late-1890s New York City (and the basis for the TNT television series of the same name).

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson