midnight in the garden of good and evil paperback

Its physical beauty should have made it the envy of every other American city. ‘The Savannah I wrote about, and lived in for much of the 1980s, was a gracious, sultry, self-absorbed city. And so, once the characters have been introduced and the stage set, the remainder of Berendt’s extraordinary book follows the lead-up to the multiple trials and the eventual hard-fought outcome. His luck finally runs out one afternoon in Williams’s study, and although it initially seems like a simple case of self-defence, the evidence increasingly points to murder. A local prostitute and hustler, Hansford is unhinged, violent and vulnerable … and living on borrowed time. And then there’s Jim Williams’s on-off lover, Danny Hansford. Mr Glover still gets paid to walk a dog that died 20 years ago Luther Diggers keeps flies tied to his jacket on tiny thread leashes and owns a bottle of poison that’s 500 times deadlier than arsenic The Lady Chablis performs in The Pickup cabaret club and used to be called Frank Minerva practices voodoo magic in the city’s graveyard. However, despite being indicted for murder, Williams is by no means the most complex or fascinating character.

This affection is apparent on every page and made even more evident in his new personal introduction.įirst to be introduced in the book is the debonair antiques dealer Jim Williams, who endears himself to Berendt and is soon revealed as the focal point of the book. However, in the space of just a few days he fell head over heels in love with the place and kept returning until it became his permanent home. Like courtroom evidence, the series of ten atmospheric photographs offer tantalising snapshots of the Old South and the city that captured the imagination of millions.īerendt first visited Savannah on a whim a break from work to a city with a nice-sounding name. More of Leigh’s original images of Savannah have been beautifully reproduced alongside seven further atmospheric photographs by Georgian photographers. Jack Leigh’s iconic photograph featured on the 1994 first edition dust jacket and is synonymous with the book. The ‘Bird Girl’ image, a photograph of the bronze statue that once stood in Bonaventure cemetery, now adorns the binding of this new edition. Now, 24 years after its first publication, this incredible true story is given its Folio debut.

His writing was so intoxicating that Midnight reinvigorated Savannah’s tourist industry and made celebrities of many of its characters. As author of the longest-standing New York Times non-fiction bestseller, John Berendt introduced the true-crime genre to a wider audience with his spellbinding descriptions of Savannah and its bounty of flamboyant characters ripe for their literary debut.

Midnight in the garden of good and evil paperback