The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Part 2, Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “An Awful Fight”

Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Chappell Redux”

Discerning something of Holmes’ true character, Emeline told her friends and neighbors, the Lawrences, that she had considered leaving him. She disappeared just prior to Christmas without saying goodbye. When pressed, Holmes stated flatly that she had left to be married, producing a typeset wedding announcement as evidence. News of the marriage reached her family and hometown’s newspaper. Still, Mrs. Lawrence was not satisfied and observed a large trunk leave Holmes’ apartments the day after Emeline had gone missing. Weeks later, her trunk of personal effects arrived at her parents’ home, where it was later assumed that she had died while on honeymoon in Europe. On January 2nd, Holmes had once again enlisted the help of Charles Chappell. A footprint had been etched on the interior of the furnace door.

Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Cold-Blooded Fact”

With just four months to go until Dedication Day, the temperature was 20 degrees below zero, and Harry Codman died of appendicitis. Nothing as heavy as Ferris’ axle had been lifted before. Olmsted recruited a former assistant, Charles Eliot, as his partner and reluctantly delegated oversight of the works to his superintendent, Rudolph Ulrich. The roof of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building collapses under the snow. With two months to go, only the Woman’s Building was complete.

Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Acquiring Minnie”

Holmes’ businesses were flourishing, but the private detectives hired by the Cigrand and Connor families were knocking on his door. In March, Holmes hired Minnie Williams, a Bostonian girl with a large inheritance, as his secretary. Holmes had met and wooed her while he was traveling under the pseudonym Henry Gordon. Having fallen for Holmes, she followed him to Chicago, ostensibly on the pretext of having a new role there. The pair reunited. He proposed to her, and she wrote to her sister Anna to inform her. Holmes responded promptly and politely to Cigrand’s father’s letters. Minnie signed her fortune over to another of Holmes’ aliases. Holmes established another fictional company. The wedding to Minnie was a fake.

Part 2, Chapters 10-12 Analysis

Larson’s tale in these chapters is full of words from the detective novel register. Footprints, pseudonyms, and mysterious parcels are among the elements that feature in such fictions. With his many pseudonyms, correspondence with the Cigrands, and ability to convincingly weave fictions, Holmes steps into the role of novelist for Larson. In this true story, Holmes is the storyteller who decides when his victims should die: “That the name Phelps was an alias that Holmes’ assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, had used when he first met Emeline at the Keeley Institute” (190). Holmes’ actions are so heinous that even in the contemporary reports they sound fictional. By subsuming them in a novelistic narrative in which the reader has already suspended disbelief, their visceral reality is made all the more alarming.

Larson also fictionalizes Burnham’s efforts. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building collapses in a storm just prior to the opening of the fair. Larson refers to the structure as a “marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris” (196). Burnham’s structure not only has a flaw, but like the heroes of classical literature, it has a tragic flaw. For Larson, Holmes is not the only devil in Chicago. Burnham, too, possesses excessive pride and ambition, the fatal flaws that landed the rebels in hell. The monolith of steel is something of a biblical leviathan. Larson reminds us that as the saying goes, pride comes before a fall.