It is apparently the era of true crime movies! Recently, we heard about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck making a movie about Whitey Bulger. And now, according to Deadline, Leonardo DiCaprio will play serial killer H.H. Holmes in the movie adaptation of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic And Madness At The Fair That Changed America.
The “Fair” of the title is the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. While the city prepped, planned, prepared, and celebrated, Holmes killed at least twenty-seven women. Although he never admitted to more, estimates put his actual victim count as high as 200.
I remember when this book was All the Thing, so I read it, and was vastly disappointed–there was no intersection of the two storylines, as far as I could tell, and the writing from the serial killer’s side was over the top melodramatic, while the history of the World Fair was measured and interesting. A schizophrenic book that didn’t seem like it knew the other personality was out there.