Adam Selzer is a tour guide in Chicago who started digging into H.H. Holmes when he was asked to put together a tour based on the book “The Devil in the White City.” That book by Erik Larson juxtaposed the myth of Holmes, America’s first serial killer, with the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago but Selzer read through the old newspapers from the 1890s at the library and discovered that almost all the tales that had been written about Holmes were inaccurate, often wildly so. This book is the fruit of his research and it drastically revises the story of this notorious criminal.
For years Holmes had a grisly reputation for having built a hotel (dubbed the “Murder Castle) just before the Fair to lure out of town guests who he then robbed and murdered, often in gruesome fashion, based on what was discovered in a search of the building. But Selzer combed through the existing primary source material: newspapers of the day, a half dozen from Chicago alone, papers from Philadelphia, Texas, Toronto, and elsewhere, a book written by a detective who investigated Holmes, and one by a doctor who published a study of Holmes. Using these sources, Selzer is able to discredit the more far-fetched accounts of Holmes’s crimes including Holmes’s confessions and subsequent retellings of Holmes’s life in sensationalistic newspaper articles and outlandish books.
The true history does include numerous murders but nowhere near as many as had been enumerated in previous unsourced accounts. Holmes’s criminal activity focused on swindling everybody from furniture companies to builders and Selzer also went through the legal archives to try to figure out who had been had. Holmes used a variety of dishonest practices to steal from others, he married numerous women without divorcing previous wives, and he also took on a variety of aliases and at times the book bogs down in a confusing parade of scams and lawsuits that are difficult to understand. One of my favourite quotes is from an insurance investigator who said, “I was continually running across evidence that Holmes was leading a double life. In fact, at times it might be said he was living a quadruple life.”
The book has a picturesque old-timey true crime feel. After Holmes’s youth and time spent in medical school, where his criminal proclivities began to show, Holmes ends up in Chicago in the 1880s where he moved about the worlds of medicine, real estate development, and business. He gets involved in scams involving copying machines and glass bending and he sues and is sued numerous times. From there he moves on to swindling insurance companies by burning his own buildings and plots involving faked deaths to collect life insurance. Through a combination of intrepid insurance company investigators and Holmes’s own blabber mouth while talking to a train robber in jail in St. Louis his crimes are eventually revealed.
The bulk of this book is a detailed recounting of everything that can be discerned about these crimes from the available primary sources, but that isn’t always a neat, orderly narrative. It’s not the fault of the author of the book that the collection of newspapers articles, lawsuit records, and contemporaneous books leave many mysteries unsolved here. There is a fine coda where Selzer shows how a sensational newspaper article and a few other over-the-top sources led to the myth of the devil in the White City and Selzer’s brief reflection on this myth-making provides, I think, much food for thought. It turns out a more interesting story than the one about the depths of evil in man is this one about lies and the truth and their foundations.
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Top reviews from other countries
Amanda GRIFFITHS-JONES
Superbly Researched
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2022
Phil an Amazon Customer
Realistic approach to the story of the real ripper
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2021
Tracy King
Must-read for anyone interested in Holmes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 3, 2017Hughie Jones
not as gruesome as the stories about HHHolmes in past decades
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 3, 2017
