Devil in a Blue Dress

His ambition was to create a game which involved the suffering of others. Killing people created him a sort of pleasure, “Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend lives of people” (Larson 355). Holmes always looked for people that he saw as weak and he used them to create his game which to him was to see how far he could go in changing a person’s life. While Geyer was investigating the disappearances of the Pitezel children he said that all criminals had a motive but no one really saw clearly what Holmes’ motive was. Later Geyer was drawn to the conclusion of Holmes wanting to have power over people’s lives. Holmes wanted to control people and produce others a suffering as he did when Carrie Pitezel was put in a hotel by Holmes in front of the hotel her children were in, without any of them knowing, that was his game. In the novel both Burnham and Holmes had ambitions but both had very different ambitions, which led their lives in different paths. Burnham by having the ambition to want Chicago to prosper became America’s best architect. Holmes’ ambition took him to jail and eventually to his death. The novel The Devil in the White City, illustrates that everything is not what it seems using the character Holmes and the creation of the World’s Fair. Holmes was known as a charming doctor that starstruck every woman that he laid an eye upon. It was said by

The Devil in the White City reads, “As word spread that a young, handsome, and apparently unmarried doctor now stood behind the counter, an increasing number of single women in their twenties began to patronize the store”(Larson 46). You can’t build a log cabin without wood, and you can’t be a serial killer without victims. Victims are an essential part to the art of murder. As a result, he had a plentiful picking because he was “young, handsome and apparently unmarried”.  These attributes make Holmes a very charismatic person. While Holmes was being escorted to his death, the novel reads, “This was a difficult moment for his guards. They liked Holmes. They knew he was a killer, but he was a charming killer”(Larson 386). Even though the guards knew Holmes was a despicable person, they still liked him and found him “charming”. His charisma was such a potent attribute, even if people knew the real him...as seen in the text….they stilled “liked him”. They knew he had murdered innocent women and children, but still founded him “charming”. As can be concluded from the examples, Holmes’s charisma served him well in becoming a long time anonymous perpetrator.

The irony that such a positive global statement could be at the same place at the same time as such terror as Dr. Holmes’s murders was daunting and it lured him to pursue this particular case. He says he would not have been interested in just doing a book about the Fair or just about Holmes. But together they made a unity of good and evil. Though Holmes is the obvious criminal in this novel, Larson doesn’t particularly characterize him that way.

When H.H. Holmes arrives in Chicago, he looks like any other ambitious young doctor braving the journey to the Windy City to start a new life. “He walked with confidence and dressed well, conjuring an impression of wealth and achievement. He was twenty-six years old… He had dark hair and striking blue eyes, once likened to the eyes of a Mesmerist,” describes the author. Larson cites a physician, John L. Capen, “‘Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes’” (35). In including this citation, Larson clues the reader in on Holmes’ true nature in addition to eliciting a feeling of unease through his diction. With this first impression, the reader is already wary of Holmes and his actions. Larson further solidifies this distrust with the following passages. “The city had impressed [Holmes], he said later, which was surprising because as a rule nothing impressed him, nothing moved him. Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next to calculation of worth, and last is a decision to act or remain motionless.” (37) With this quotation, Larson explains how Holmes chose

Holmes’s career as a pharmacist is turning out to be a good job for him. He starts to travel to Minneapolis quite often as there is a girl, Myrta, there he likes and wants to marry. They eventually get married and move back to Chicago. Quickly Myrta becomes jealous because of all the attention Holmes receives from other girls at the pharmacy. Eventually Myrta moves out and lives with her parents. Holmes’s buys land across the

It is while in jail Holmes confided in a cellmate by the name of Marion Hedgepeth of the plan to defraud the insurance company. Hedgepeth agreed to give Holmes the contact information of a crooked attorney in turn for $500 dollars, promised to be paid once Holmes received the insurance payoff. It was several weeks after this event before Holmes and Pitezel arrived in Philadelphia, where they rented a storefront and posed as a patent dealer. It is here where Holmes murdered Pitezel with chloroform, burning his face, and setting the building on fire in an attempt to make it appear like a chemical laboratory accident. Once the body was discovered, it had to be positively identified by a family member in order for the insurance company to pay the

In the book, The Devil in the White City, written by Erik Larson, he created the book in order to inform his audience about what had happened at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. He included the process of how the fair became the World's Fair and how it was built. However, he also describes the sick understory of Henry Holmes. Larson did so, so he could illustrate that the world was so blinded by the extravagance of the fair, therefore paid no attention to the serial killing that was happening only a few blocks away from the fair. Homes had a fairly neutral viewpoint, however; he leaned towards siding with Henry Homes because he portrays Holmes as more gentle and he give reasons for Homes actions.

Larson uses extreme detail to make the reader fully understand the evil in Holmes and gain a grasp of Holmes’s mind and inner thoughts. Holmes “admitted to killing 27 people” however, there is no proven number. He at least murdered 9 people but estimates range as high as 200.This means that his violence was not limited to a certain number of people there is a high range of doubt to who died by Holmes’s hand . Next we see the distortion within holmes. He describes himself as “ believing that he is resembling the devil” this further adds to his earlier point of him being “born with the devil inside him”.(109)This further proves the issues holmes has mentally.

“They tend to share certain key characteristics. They're manipulative, cold, and lack what we might call a moral compass--they know right from wrong but are not invested in that distinction. Their only concern with their ‘wrong’ behavior is getting caught, but because they are deceitful, callous and not subject to anxiety, they easily elude capture” (Spikol, 5). These sort of criminals were ones that the Chicago Police Department had never been introduced to before, causing them to change their entire perspective on cases once Holmes’ had passed. According to John Bartlow Martin, a writer for the “Harper’s Archive”, Holmes’ murder castle was filled with trapdoors, gas chambers, secret passageways, and even pits of acid used to get rid of bodies and other pieces of evidence. These were all things that the law enforcers had never even heard of in a story, much less seen or thought of in real life. It’s safe to say that Holmes drastically affected the police’s outlook on the cases in the near, and even far, future of criminals after his mystery; or at least part of his mystery had been

“After the fair he intended to burn the building to collect the insurance and, as a happy dividend, destroy whatever surplus “material” might remain in its hidden storage chambers, although ideally, given other disposal measures available to him, the building by then would contain nothing of an incriminating nature” (85). This allows the reader into the mind of Holmes and create an understanding that Holmes had no interest in the innocent people that were going to be hurt because of him. Assuming the role of architect once more, Holmes hired carpenters, in which they started remodeling the second and third floors of his building. Once again Holmes’s method of segregating tasks and firing workers proved successful. Holmes had already used this method of firing workers by claiming that they had done an inferior job, and his true intention succeeded since Holmes did not pay the workers for the job they

Larson describes Holmes as a well dressed man who made an “impression of wealth and achievement”(Larson 35). Holmes uses his charm to allure women and achieve higher standards in business. Holmes was not like traditional men “he broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy.. and women adored him for it”(Larson 36). He was a different kind of man. Holmes was able to use his words to his advantage.

Walter Mosley’s novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, explores the racial prejudices in Los Angeles during the 1940’s. The novel takes place in 1948, when the United States was still legally segregated into black and white communities and when people divided themselves into lower and upper classes. Easy Rawlins, the main character in the book, is an ordinary lower class African American worker, who faces limited opportunities and little money to live on. Throughout the novel, Easy Rawlins experiences firsthand the blatant racism prevailing in 1948. Walter Mosley’s novel reveals how life was in Los Angeles after WWII, before the civil rights movement. By viewing an American city from the perspective of a black lead character, Devil in A Blue Dress helps one become more conscious of how racial barriers have appeared in the eyes of African-Americans.

“Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing.” (pg 23) There are two levels of power, emotional and physical power. Holmes was the kind of man who had learned to master both. He was stunningly handsome, and emotionally manipulative, a poison for anyone who could get close to him. In this quote, it shows just how addictive Holmes was to the people around him. He’s like candy. After you’ve had a piece or two, deep down you know it’s not good for you, but the feelings it gives you trump all doubt you have. A deadly mix of youthful exhilaration and feelings of lust, and the combined fact that the man they want so badly is a cold serial

The World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, occupied the streets of Chicago in 1893. With the crowding of people, tourists have a high demand for a place to stay during their visit. A young man by the name of H.H. Holmes decides to open up a large hotel during the Columbian Exposition to bring in extra money. Little did his customers know that the man they are staying with would soon become one of the first documented serial killers. Many aspects throughout Holmes’s life formed him into the kind of person he turned out to be. Influences from his childhood, his greed for money and power, and his intelligence gave him the ability to construct his “Murder

Copley’s piece titled Portrait of a Lady in a Blue Dress created in 1763 by John Singleton Copley, represents an unnamed female portrait painted with oil on canvas. The piece currently resides in the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The work of art can be seen from one side only because it hangs on the wall. There is a great deal of indications in the painting to show the viewer who this woman was and how she ranked high within society.