25 must read books - XIV

Devil in the white city

Chicago,1893. A new city was being made for hosting the 1893 World fair which will put America prominent place in the world. Two men--the brilliant architects behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair - were striving super humanly to complete the task of constructing the Fair city in time. And a cunning serial killer used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make Chicago their home. The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit.The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city's rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder.

  In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed each other rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred homicides. Four a day.

And in Chicago a young handsome doctor, H.H.Holmes. stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamour, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his liking. 



The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and untold others, addressed to that strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and daughters' children.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root.

The climax is better read.

It is non fiction which reads like a thriller.

Namaste

Prabir