Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio CD]

John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

After discovering in the early 1980s that a super-saver fare to Savannah, Ga., cost the same as an entree in a nouvelle Manhattan restaurant, Esquire columnist Berendt spent the next eight years flitting between Savannah and New York City. The result is this collection of smart, sympathetic observations about his colorful Southern neighbors, including a jazz-playing real estate shark; a sexually adventurous art student; the Lady Chablis (' "What was your name before that?" I asked. "Frank," she said.' "); the gossipy Married Woman's Card Club; and an assortment of aging Southern belles. The book is also about the wealthy international antiques dealer Jim Williams, who played an active role in the historic city's restoration--and would also be tried four times for the 1981 shooting death of 21-year-old Danny Handsford, his high-energy, self-destructive house helper. The Williams trials--he died in 1990 of a heart attack at age 59--are lively matches between dueling attorneys fought with shifting evidence, and they serve as both theme and anchor to Berendt's illuminating and captivating travelogue.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

It's difficult to categorize this book. On one level, it is a travelog, recounting former New York magazine editor Berendt's eight years in Savannah, Georgia, that beautifully preserved hothouse of the South where eccentric characters like black drag queen Lady Chablis and charming con man Joe Odom blossom in rich profusion. It is also a true crime tale, the saga of antiques dealer Jim Williams whose 1981 shooting of his sometime lover Danny Hansford in the historic Mercer House obsesses Savannah denizens; they watch as Williams endures four trials and is eventually acquitted, only to die of a heart attack a few months later, haunted (some say) by Hansford's vengeful ghost. Although nonfiction, Berendt's book reads like a novel (he admits he has taken "certain storytelling liberties"), and this reviewer sometimes wondered where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Still, this entertaining book will appeal to many readers. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/93.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

This work is a wonderfully subtle and well-told story of life in Savannah, Georgia, during the eight years the New York-based Esquire magazine columnist spent there as an "experiment in bi-urban living." It is an old saw that the Deep South is populated exclusively by faded beauty queens, con men, eccentric socialites, and a skeleton in every closet, but Berendt manages to tread on the edges of the stereotype without caricature or condescension. "Always stick around for one more drink," one of the local characters advises him early in the book. "That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know." Berendt not only takes the drink but is game for every half-baked errand he is asked to perform, always with excellent narrative results. Perhaps one of the things that make this nonfiction work unique is that its plot centers on a murder, but Berendt takes his sweet time getting around to that fact, allowing the reader to be as surprised as he must have been watching the events unfold. Midnight is a solidly rewarding read. Martha Schoolman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Steamy Savannah--and the almost unbelievable assortment of colorful eccentrics that the city seems to nurture--are minutely and wittily observed here. In the early 1980's, Berendt (former editor of New York Magazine) realized that for the price of a nouvelle cuisine meal, he could fly to just about any city in the US that intrigued him. In the course of these travels, he fell under the spell of Savannah, and moved there for a few years. Central to his story here is his acquaintance with Jim Williams, a Gatsby-like, newly moneyed antiques dealer, and Williams's sometime lover Danny Hansford, a ``walking streak of sex''--a volatile, dangerous young hustler whose fatal shooting by Williams obsesses the city. Other notable characters include Chablis, a show-stealing black drag queen; Joe Odom, cheerfully amoral impresario and restaurateur; Luther Driggers, inventor of the flea collar, who likes it to be known that he has a supply of poison so lethal that he could wipe out every person in the city if he chose to slip it into the water supply; and Minerva, a black occultist who works with roots and whom Williams hires to help deal with what the antiques dealer believes to be Hansford's vengeful ghost. Showing a talent for penetrating any social barrier, Berendt gets himself invited to the tony Married Women's Club; the rigidly proper Black Debutantes' Ball (which Chablis crashes); the inner sanctum of power-lawyer Sonny Seiler; and one of Williams's fabled Christmas parties (the one for a mixed group; the author opts out of the following evening's ``bachelors only'' fˆte). The imprisonment and trial of Williams, and his surprising fate, form the narrative thread that stitches together this crazy quilt of oddballs, poseurs, snobs, sorceresses, and outlaws. Stylish, brilliant, hilarious, and coolhearted. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“Elegant and wicked…. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime." —The New York Times Book Review


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981.  Was it murder or self-defense?  For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares.  John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.  Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.



It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman's Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the "soul of pampered self-absorption"; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight.  These and other Savannahians act as a Greek chorus, with Berendt revealing the alliances, hostilities, and intrigues that thrive in a town where everyone knows everyone else.



Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story is a sublime and seductive reading experience.  Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city is certain to become a modern classic.


From the Hardcover edition.

The son of two writers, John Berendt grew up in Syracuse, New York. He earned a B.A. in English from Harvard University, where he worked on the staff of The Harvard Lampoon. After graduating in 1961, he moved to New York City to pursue a career in publishing. Berendt has written for David Frost and Dick Cavett, was editor of New York magazine from 1977 to 1979, and wrote a monthly column for Esquire from 1982 to 1994.

Berendt first traveled to Savannah in the early 1980s, when he realized that he could fly there for a three-day weekend for the price of “a paillard of veal served on a bed of wilted radicchio” [p. 24] in one of New York’s trendier restaurants. Over the ensuing eight years his visits became more frequent and extended, until he was spending more time in Savannah than in New York.

Part of the appeal, Berendt says, lay in the city’s penchant for morbid gossip: “People in Savannah don’t say, ‘Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on her coat.’ Instead, they say, 'Before leaving the room, Mrs. Jones put on the coat that her third husband gave her before he shot himself in the head.” (Entertainment Weekly, 3/11/94, p. 52)

Since the publication and unprecedented success of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt has become a Savannah celebrity and was even presented with the key to the city. “I took it down to City Hall one night to see if it would work, but it didn't.” (Syracuse Post Standard, 4/5/1994)


From the Trade Paperback edition.

He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features: a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning sliver
at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine - he could see out, but you
couldn't see in. We were sitting in the living room of his Victorian house. It was a mansion, really, with fifteen-foot ceilings
and large, well-proportioned rooms. A graceful spiral stairway rose from the center hall toward a domed skylight.
There was a ballroom on the second floor. It was Mercer House, one of the last of Savannah's great houses still in private
hands. Together with the walled garden and the carriage house in back, it occupied an entire city block. If Mercer
House was not quite the biggest private house in Savannah, it was certainly the most grandly furnished. Architectural Digest
had devoted six pages to it. A book on the interiors of the world's great houses featured it alongside Sagamore Hill,
Biltmore, and Chartwell. Mercer House was the envy of house-proud Savannah. Jim Williams lived in it alone.

Williams was smoking a King Edward cigarillo. "What I enjoy most," he said, "is living like an aristocrat without the
burden of having to be one. Blue bloods are so inbred and weak. All those generations of importance and grandeur to
live up to. No wonder they lack ambition. I don't envy them. It's only the trappings of aristocracy that I find
worthwhile - the fine furniture, the paintings, the sliver--the very things they have to sell when the money runs out. And
it always does. Then all they're left with is their lovely manners."

He spoke in a drawl as soft as velvet. The walls of his house were hung with portraits of European and American
aristocrats - by Gainsborough, Hudson, Reynolds, Whistler. The provenance of his possessions traced back to dukes and
duchesses, kings, queens, czars, emperors, and dictators. "Anyhow," he said, "royalty is better."

Williams tapped a cigar ash into a sliver ashtray. A dark gray tiger cat climbed up and settled in his lap. He stroked
it gently. "I know I'm apt to give the wrong impression, living the way I do. But I'm not trying to fool anyone. Years
ago I was showing a group of visitors through the house and I noticed one man giving his wife the high sign. I saw him
mouth the words 'old money!' The man was David Howard, the world's leading expert on armorial Chinese porcelain. I
took him aside afterward and said, 'Mr. Howard, I was born in Gordon, Georgia. That's a little town near Macon. The
biggest thing in Gordon is a chalk mine. My father was a barber, and my mother worked as a secretary for the mine.
My money - what there is of it - is about eleven years old.' Well, the man was completely taken aback. 'Do you know
what made me think you were from an old family,' he said, 'apart from the portraits and the antiques? Those chairs over
there. The needlework on the covers is unraveling. New money would mend it right away. Old money would leave it
just as it is.' 'I know that,' I told him. 'Some of my best customers are old money.'"

* * *

I had heard Jim Williams's name mentioned often during the six months I had lived in Savannah. The house was one reason,
son, but there were others. He was a successful dealer in antiques and restorer of old houses. He had been president of
the Telfair Academy, the local art museum. His by-line had appeared in Antiques magazine, and the magazine's editor,
Wendell Garrett, spoke of him as a genius: "He has an extraordinary eye for finding stuff. He trusts his own judgment,
and he's willing to take chances. He'll hop on a plane and go anywhere to an auction - to New York, to London,
to Geneva. But at heart he's a southern chauvinist, very much a son of the region. I don't think he cares much for
Yankees."

Williams had played an active role in the restoration of Savannah's historic district, starting in the mid-1950s. Georgia
Fawcett, a longtime preservationist, recalled how difficult it had been to get people involved in saving downtown Savannah
in those early days. "The old part of town had become a slum," she said. "The banks had red-lined the whole
area. The great old houses were failing into ruin or being demolished to make way for gas stations and parking lots, and
you couldn't borrow any money from the banks to go in and save them. Prostitutes strolled along the streets. Couples
with children were afraid to live downtown, because it was considered dangerous." Mrs. Fawcett had been a member of
a small group of genteel preservationists who had tried since the 1930s to stave off the gas stations and save the houses.
"One thing we did do," she said. "We got the bachelors interested."

Jim Williams was one of the bachelors. He bought a row of one-story brick tenements on East Congress Street, restored
the whole row, and sold it. Soon he was buying, restoring, and selling dozens of houses all over downtown
Savannah. Stories in the newspapers drew attention to his restorations, and his antiques business grew. He started going
to Europe once a year on buying trips. He was discovered by society hostesses. The improvement in Williams'
fortunes paralleled the renaissance of Savannah's historic district. By the early 1970s, couples with children came back
downtown, and the prostitutes moved over to Montgomery Street.

Feeling flush, Williams bought Cabbage Island, one of the sea islands that form an archipelago along the Georgia
coast. Cabbage Island was a folly. It covered eighteen hundred acres, all but five of which lay under water at high tide.
He paid $5,000 for it in 1966. Old salts at the marina told him he had been duped: Cabbage Island had been on the
market for half that sum the year before. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for a soggy piece of real estate you
couldn't even build a house on. But a few months later phosphates were discovered under several coastal islands, including
Cabbage Island. Williams sold out to Kerr-McGee of Oklahoma for $660,000. Several property owners on
neighboring islands laughed at him for jumping at the bait too quickly. They held out for a higher price. Weeks later,
the state of Georgia outlawed drilling along the coast. The phosphate deal was dead, and as it turned out, Williams
was the only one who had sold in time. His after-tax profit was a half million dollars.

Now he bought far grander houses. One of them was Armstrong House, a monumental Italian Renaissance palazzo
directly across Bull Street from the staid Oglethorpe Club. Armstrong House dwarfed the Oglethorpe Club, and,
according to local lore, that was very much its purpose. George Armstrong, a shipping magnate, was said to have
built the house in 1919 in response to being blackballed by the club. Although that story was not, in fact, true, Armstrong
House was a lion of a house. It gloated and glowered and loomed. It even had a curving colonnade that reached
out like a giant paw as if to swat the Oglethorpe Club off its high horse across the street.

The outrageous magnificence of Armstrong House appealed to Williams and to his growing appetite for grandeur.
He was not a member of the Oglethorpe Club. Bachelors from middle Georgia who sold antiques were not likely to be
asked to join - not that it bothered him. He installed his antiques shop in Armstrong House for a year and then sold the
house to the law firm of Bouhan, Williams and Levy and went on about the business of living like, if not being, an
aristocrat. He made more frequent buying trips to Europe--in style now, on the QE2--and sent back whole container
loads of important paintings and fine English furniture. He bought his first pieces of Faberge. Williams was gaining stature
in Savannah, to the irritation of certain blue bloods. "How does it feel to be nouveau riche?" he was asked on one
occasion. "It's the riche that counts," Williams answered. Having said that, he bought Mercer House.

Mercer House had been empty for more than ten years. It stood at the west end of Monterey Square, the most elegant
of Savannah's many tree-shaded squares. It was an Italianate mansion of red brick with tall, arched windows set off by
ornate ironwork balconies. It sat back from the street, aloof behind its apron of lawn and its cast-iron fence, not so much
looking out on the square as presiding over it. The most recent occupants of the house, the Shriners, had used it as the
Alee Temple. They had hung a neon-lit scimitar over the front door and driven around inside on motorcycles. Williams
set about restoring the house to something greater than its original elegance. When work was completed in
1970, he gave a black-tie Christmas party and invited the cream of Savannah society. On the night of his party, every
window of Mercer House was ablaze with candlelight; every room had sparkling chandeliers. Clusters of onlookers stood
outside watching the smart arrivals and staring in amazement at the beautiful house that had been dark for so long.
A pianist played cocktail music on the grand piano downstairs; an organist played classical pieces in the ballroom
above. Butlers in white jackets circulated with silver trays. Ladies in long gowns moved up and down the spiral stairs in
rivers of satin and silk chiffon. Old Savannah was dazzled.

The party soon became a permanent fixture on Savannah's social calendar. Williams always scheduled it to occur at the
climax of the winter season - the night before the Cotillion's debutante ball. That Friday night became known as the
night of Jim Williams' Christmas party. It was the Party of the Year, and this was no small accomplishment for Williams.
"You have to understand," a sixth-generation Savannahian declared, "Savannah takes its parties very seriously.
This is a town where gentlemen own their own white tie and ...

The South is mysterious, with mores and conventions foreign to the hustle and transience of the North. In Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil a Northern writer who lives half the time in Savannah provides a firsthand look at these mysteries, at the charisma behind the South's particular brand of good and evil. At the heart of the book is the story of Savannah's most celebrated murder, in which an eccentric antique dealer is accused of having killed his male companion. Anthony Heald performs admirably, reading this mysterious tale in a variety of soft Southern tones. Each character's individual cadence and personality are brought to life through his skillful voice. M.B.K. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.