When Esquire columnist John Berendt began dividing his time between Manhattan and Savannah in the early 1980s, it wasn’t with the idea of writing a book, much less breaking publishing records or singlehandedly reinvigorating the tourist industry of the southern city. Savannah was simply an interesting, and much cheaper, place to hang out. Once there, charmed by the eccentric locals, the journalist in him began to sense something intriguing in a murder trial then in progress (for the second of what would ultimately be four times). Published as “nonfiction,” Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil owes a heavy debt to the imaginative ambitions and techniques of fiction (for instance, Berendt begins his story before the murder happened and writes as if he’d been in Savannah at the time). No matter what’s factual and what’s fudged, it’s all, truly, stranger than fiction, and more entertaining than most truth.
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