The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and its amazing ‘White City’ was one of the wonders of the world. This is the incredible story of its realization, and of the two men whose fates it one was an architect, the other a serial killer.

The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair – and his own devilish charms – to lure scores of young women to their deaths. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago’s infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World’s Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium.

These two disparate but driven men together with a remarkable supporting cast of colourful characters, including as Buffalo Bill, George Ferris, Thomas Edison and some of the 27 million others who converged on the dazzling spectacle of the White City, are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century.

I purchased a copy of this book for my own reading.

I love true crime so this book really caught my interest. It follows the crimes of H.H. Holmes, one of the first American serial killers who was at times believed to be Jack the Ripper. At a time when Chicago tried to put itself on the map with the 1893 World’s Fair, it seemed that darkness lurked.

I’ve read plenty of true crime books, so I had an idea of what to expect when going into this. I was settling in ready for a blow-by-blow timeline of the killer’s life, their crimes and how he was caught. The way Larson has chosen to present this is something really interesting in my opinion.

It reads like two stories in one. The first is the story of H.H. Holmes, how he came to Chicago, and the heinous acts he committed. The other, and arguably larger, part of this story is that of architect Daniel Burnham—the man who lobbied for and built the White City that formed the Chicago World’s Fair. And this is interesting, that this story seems to take up the larger portion of the book than that of Holmes.

But it makes total sense in this book. Without Burnham there likely would not have been a World’s Fair in Chicago. Without a World’s Fair, there wouldn’t have been an influx of tourists and labourers to the city. Without those, there wouldn’t have been the attraction that drew Holmes into the city where he would become one of America’s first serial killers. The Devil in the White City is a fascinating window into the hope and the depravity of a growing city in the late 19th.

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