THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY by Erik Larson

Here’s a piece of non-fiction about the 1893 World Fair in Chicago and the ‘Murder Hotel’ a serial killer set up to profit from it. Clearly anything called a Murder Hotel is going to be pretty interesting, but to my surprise the World Fair was even more so.

Paris had just had a spectacularly successful World Fair (for which the Eiffel Tower was built!), and Chicago was determined to better it. They only had 2-3 years to pull it off, and they had an unhinged level of ambition. As the organizer, Burnham said: “Make no little plans; they have no power to stir mens’ blood’ (which btw I have always found to be very good advice).

They built an entire display city, that used THREE TIMES the electricity of all of Chicago. For many people, it was the first electric lighted streets they’d ever seen. They also had a wild array of displays from all over the world, even sending an explorer out to Africa who was ‘confident he could acquire as many pygmies from the Congo as he wished’ (spoiler alert, he died of fever almost immediately because Africa does not play). They had new products – it’s where Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jack, and Shredded Wheat come from. And then they had what their competitor to the Eiffel tower – a structure designed by a young engineer called Ferris – which seemed so dangerous and insane it nearly did not get built at all.

The highest point of the Ferris Wheel was as high as the highest occupied floor in the highest skyscraper in the world; the axel alone at 142K pounds was the heaviest thing ever lifted into the air, and that was only the beginning of their problems. Ferris’ wife took the first ride in the wheel, to prove his confidence in it. The fair ended up being a huge success, with more people gathering in one place than ever before in the world in peacetime.

All these people were obviously a gold mine so lots of hotels were built to accommodate them. One of these was by this HH Holmes. Holmes did not like to pay his workers, so they would often walk off the job, which was good for him because it kept the costs down and because it meant no one really knew what he was building. Because what he was building was a murder hotel. Some of the rooms were airless, with gas jets he controlled in them. Some were soundproof. There was a chute from the top floor to the basement, and in the basement was a FURNACE. He was especially fond of killing young woman, of which there was a large supply, because girls were getting their first freedom and excited to come to the big city. He also managed to convince four different women to marry him (none survived). Estimates of how many he killed range from 50-200. He was eventually caught when he killed – for zero reason – the three children of one of his accomplices.

Who knew Chicago in 1893 was so interesting!

A STOLEN LIFE by Jaycee Dugard

Here is a stomach-churning memoir about a girl who was abducted at 11 and spent 17 years in captivity. The man who abducted her raped her and she had two children, the first at f4. Appallingly she had them both without a hospital. This man who abducted her had a wife, who did not abuse her but absolutely participated in the imprisonment, which is one of the more gobsmacking parts of the story. So much did her kidnapper think of Jaycee as an object that sometimes he would leave her tied up in his revolting ways (for videos) for long periods simply because he forgot he needed to go pick the wife up at work.

We will be zero percent surprised to learn that this guy already had a record, for kidnapping and sexual assault, and had been let out of prison early for good behaviour. His probation officer apparently did not query what these female children who were not related to him were doing at his house. The way this poor woman was eventually saved therefore was – get this – a CAMPUS SECURITY GUARD, who saw the children briefly in passing was enough concerned that they were ‘dead-eyed’ that what she called ‘mom mode’ kicked in and she went to the police. Then they found poor Jaycee living in a shack in the backyard where she’d been for almost twenty years. In police interview she said she was too frightened to say her own name, but she could write it down – can imagine the surprise of the police?!

As ever in these kinds of stories, what you are left with is the incredible resilience of human beings. Jaycee is moving forward with her life, valuing the time she has, and working on letting go of the past. She’s having fun, learning to drive, enjoying going to the shops on her own. What a hero.

IN CHANCERY by John Galsworthy


This is the second book in the Forsythe saga, a story of wealthy British family in the early twentieth century. The first one was about a man whose wife falls in love with someone else. As divorce was very hard to achieve, cue a lot of being tormented. In this second book, everyone gets their acts together and does what they should have done in the first place, i.e: ignore the haters and just get a divorce! Meanwhile some other characters die in the Boer War. I am not sure how many more of these books I am going to do. The wife character is really an insufferable ‘perfect fantasy’ and it’s really irritating me for some reason.

RIVER OF THE GODS by Candice Millard

Okay this one is really interesting. It just shows you that some people are miles ahead of their time. It’s about the identification of the source of the Nile, a topic of great interest in the west since Roman times, during which it a commonplace to call anything challenging ‘as difficult as to find the source of the Nile’. Several legions died trying. The mystery was eventually solved by John Speke. However, the hero of the tale is one Richard Burton.

This remarkable man, while British on paper was brought up all over Europe. (Big props to Burton as a schoolboy, who observed: ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire, but then it never rises either’). He grew up to be incredible at languages, speaking 25 well, and many dialetics. He had a system in which he could acquire a new language in two months, and never seemed to understand why others found it hard (!) He was the first Western person to go on the Haaj, managing to disguise himself as a Muslim (incredibly impressive, also very problematic).


He got the commission to try and find the Nile, though the voyage was underfunded, and at the last minute added Speke. So rough was Africa on European biology that people kept dying between agreeing to join and actually going. Speke managed to stay alive. Totally different to Burton, he was an aristocrat who spoke one language (English), and that not well. His main interest in going into the interior was, get this, hunting, so he could have specimens for the private museum he planned for his estate. It’s beyond satire. To give a flavour of the man, he was offered at one point the chance to dress as an Arab to make one section of the journey safer, but declined because he thought the Arabs were just trying to demean him by making him dress like them. Burton outright LOL-ed at the idea that Arabs would think themselves inferior to the English.


The two men and their army of porters endured many terrible things, starvation, fevers (a LOT of them), attack (in Burton’s case a spear through the mouth), etc. To give Speke his due, he was tough as hell. Once he was cover in beetles and tried to get one out of his ear with a knife, which ended up leaving him deaf. Here is Burton describing one incident, saying that he had set out to do or die, and: ‘I had done my best, and now nothing appeared to remain for me but to die as well.’


At the end of the expedition they were able to more or less figure that the source was in one of three lakes they had found (i.e., been led to by locals). One of these lakes only Speke had been to, Burton being too unwell. Speke became convinced this was the source. Getting back to England before Burton, he controlled the narrative, and the posh people in the Royal Geographic decided this posh man was clearly a better choice to lead the second Expedition than Burton. He was obviously heartbroken. Speke went back, established it was the lake he had seen, and then renamed it from Nyanza to Lake Victoria:


“Burton had found the renaming of the Nyanza not just presumptuous but preposterous: ‘My views . . . About retaining native nomenclature have ever been fixed, and of the strongest. Nothing can be so absurd as to impose English names on any part, but especially upon places in the remote interior parts of Africa’”


How contemporary is this man?!? Side bar, here he is on the Indians: Writing that Indians would soon decide that ‘the English are not brave, nor clever, no generous, not civilized, nor anything but surpassing rogues.’
You can see where he was not popular with the upper classes. Burton went on to variety of minor civil service roles while Speke had a fatal hunting accident that sounds a lot like a suicide. He had told Burton years before that “being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.”


Burton went on to translate the Kama Sutra (!), which made him a rich man. I loved this: “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguishing myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment nor a thank you nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age, and immeditaely make sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.”

While Speke has the honour of identifying the source, Burton is the one about home multiple biographies are written; poor Speke has one monograph from over a hundred years ago. So I guess there’s justice in that somewhere.