Goodreads Doesn't Have It, Data Migration: The Devil in the White City
This book is a really good study in how criminals lay the bricks of their crime empires by making sure no one person stays very long with any one node (this is how traffickers operate) to see that something is going on, as well as making sure no one person sees the whole blueprint just like they do (unless they have exceptional inductive capacity). In the case of the Devil in the White City, it was literally. He was even sort of testing the compartmentalization of interpersonal communication at one point with the below. This is a good study in these pathetic lunatics and how they do it.
The detective didn't apprehend Holmes for one reason and one reason alone; their admitted mental weakness in not seeing that evil does not have boundaries. They didn't believe that someone could have someone's wife ten minutes away from their estranged children and enjoy playing innocent relay of messages between the two, withholding messages sometimes, giving them at other times, perhaps even reading and faking some...it didn't make sense to them. So they didn't see it. They had preconceived ideas about what murderers were or could be, and were not good at letting the investigation show its true self. That seems to be the common theme in the Osange Murders that occurred around the same time.
It also didn't create the obvious large-scale tie-ins what could make of it; the overstimulation and nerve-frying nature of a fair that almost attracted a million people in one day only to be burned to the ground, the wheel like the hog slaughterhouse where a man ran around like a hog in fact on not only one cycle but two. (He only stopped because a skirt was thrown over his eyes, like at an execution...it was during this time that both Nikola Tesla showed his frightening display of electricity coursing over his body at the fair and electricity became used for public execution shortly after.) The use of the fair as simply existing to bring shame to France's Eiffel fair, only for Burnham to suggest burning it to the ground once its use was done...and it was. And the use of women for novel, fleeting moments of believing Holmes to be a dashing, innocent man...only for the unpaid creditors to come knocking quick at his door. The same piggish hope to get women signed up on life insurance to steal their money like any hopeless low class criminal...but riding on the elaborate excesses of the largest attended event in history up to that time in the Chicago Fair and the profound, yet unmatched American genius of Nikola Tesla and even more so the Promethean use of electricity to begin cities like Phoenix which were a combination of near suicide and rebirth at once...
What is most interesting is that the electrifying nature of the fair, at the final shock, collapses back into the body like the head of Chicago itself electrified to death enraged at the success of France, which did not burn the remnants of its fair (and thus led to their understanding and later, one-upping in America). And yet, the Court of Honor is said to be one of the most beautiful architectural events, rivaling architecture in Europe on which it is based...only to be burned to the ground again by labor. The unsustainable dream, the unsustainable high.
Really, the couples demanding to be married at the highest point on the new Ferris wheel and the hot hair balloon ripped to shreds in a storm are the best metaphor for the time; excrutiatingly perfect moments causing collapse around them when other dreams cannot compare, and leaving behind tides of those "addicted" to what human rights had been left behind in an expensive few-month dream.
It all comes full circle (literally) when the author asks, how could this man have offered the children he murdered lemon pie and ice cream, only to gas them in the box where their belongings were, and bury the remains?
I think most notably was the fact even at the end, he is truly disgusting...writing how he is innocent. Insisting he is innocent, despite the evidence. Despite him capitulating in his own ways without giving himself up as with Howard. His acts are senseless and pathetic, an addict to the sexual feeling of power in having them trapped and hearing them scream, doing what he wanted in full control, and in the end when he is found out giving nothing. Going to the depths certain he is smarter than everyone that has found him out most certainly. I was left with the sense he was truly pathetic; riding a strange current of excess and extremes that came about inside the capitalist American narcissistic rage at the French world fair; a Europe that also had captured Russia's ego in its founding of St. Petersburg as well with the same murder of labor. And that that huge Jackson Park of narcissistic rage had its own smaller echoes of narcissistic rage in Holmes' castle; his own attempts at life-blood and excitement bleeding, dripping, and clanking into his own hands at a smaller scale than 3 tons of silver but certainly quite a profit when promises of staying were themselves burned down in cashed out life insurance policies...that genius like Eiffel echoes down in the cries of rage at its existence that grow smaller and smaller in scale and leave depressive darkness behind when they themselves discover themselves no generative force but pathetic begging of innocence...therefore proving they were simply conduits of the energy of others, and that Tesla himself lived that reality. Yet at least he had the humility to say his brain was but a receiver...not so with the American capitalist in most cases, so quick to insist his name where it has no right to be.
The weakness of not believing people were capable of that and the weakness of believing him when the evidence pointed to his guilt...the weakness of trust, of those of us who rely on such trust...it all belies the tensions between social contract and capitalism curving each other in and out in an ongoing circle one can only hope to ride in some sort of peace amidst the frenetic tension.
I also just think the prose of Mr. Larson's is excellent. Quite a stylist, and it never comes off to excessive or blathering. It is crisp and lyrical. The pacing is crisp, 3 page sprints that drive themselves in quick bursts. Changes of scene so as to not get too bogged in and so everything still feels fresh. Vocabulary is rich, tension and mystery adequately kept through laying down the scenes of evil in the larger relay of excitement and normalcy in the fair's setting. However, for all its beauty, it lacks five star quality for failing to see like one might see at that exquisite cusp of that eternal cycle of capital and society...the ways these pieces tie into an enormous international picture that even he is as author failed to see and fell prey to. I would like to see it all sutured together in the end in a more profound way, and this is where he himself falls flat after the attempt. I've done what I can in this review, but would love for it to be more symphonic, orchestral, bringing all these pieces into a final note at the end. It set itself up for that, and ultimately just couldn't take the ride and sort of released Larson to his knees after having had him write it, for him to sit dry heaving for awhile and finish up with the afternotes. He missed that moment of seeing "all nearly million", even if he experienced it.
Even in the end, Holmes is the pathetic capitalist trying to lay claim over the forces around which he was merely a conduit. Afraid of what his own, barely conscious, impulses had left him dissecting corpses for thrill and power, not for science, he insisted in being buried in heaps of concrete. Apparently this was to save him from the "pickling vat and the knife" of science. This is very similar to Burnham's need to burn the White City, and even when refused, labor did it for him anyway. After all, it was Burnham who had scientifically scried the remains of the Paris fair for how he could do it better in Chicago, that being the White City's sole reason for existence anyway.
In the end, the slaughterhouse is put onto its own rung and cast down into the abyss itself; the Ferris wheel dynamited, the books on Holmes picked for scraps for even smaller wannabes...describing victims as full of life, that murder is like bicycling for hours, that he was a God amongst men in disguise, barely wearing anything as one beats back the current of hate and sometimes just simple testosterone...the author notes the swimmers are very short on clothes and very hairy.
Well, anybody from the ancient cult of Aphrodite would not give pause to say capitalism and all its narcissistic rages is very far from the dolphins who simply ride the wave, and thrust themselves up from the depths for the most part.
A very good book, very beautifully written, but in the end falls just short of pinpointing a true source.