Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

It began with a cheap flight. John Berendt was a food writer in New York during the 1980s, a time when airlines practically gave away tickets. He'd fly somewhere for a weekend, eat well, and come home. That's how he found himself in Charleston, South Carolina, with a few extra days and a hunch.

He decided to drive south to Savannah.

The city had fascinated him since childhood. He'd read *Treasure Island* and imagined its coast. More strangely, an old newspaper clipping had lined his wooden chest for years, with a headline that read: "Tango is No Sign of Insanity, Holds Jury." Something about that phrase stuck with him. Savannah, he sensed, was a place where the ordinary rules didn't quite apply.

He was right.

What Berendt found in Savannah wasn't just another charming Southern town. It was something rarefied, almost exotic—a city that had spent generations marooned on the Georgia coast, cut off from the outside world. As he'd later write, Savannah reminded him of Pitcairn Island, that tiny rock in the Pacific where descendants of the *H.M.S. Bounty* mutineers had lived in isolation since the eighteenth century. Seven generations of Savannahians had been similarly isolated, marooned in their hushed and secluded city. And that isolation had produced something extraordinary.

During his first visit, Berendt met a woman named Mary Harty, a long-time resident who seemed determined to show him the real Savannah—not the polished version the tour guides offered, but the one beneath the surface. She packed a wicker basket with martinis and took him to Bonaventure Cemetery. Not to mourn, but to sit at the grave of Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. They drank martinis on a bench near his tombstone, looking out over the river as ships passed by.

There, Mary Harty told him stories. She spoke of Savannah's unique character, its famous and infamous residents, its history of violence and excess. She told him about the Aikens—how Conrad's mother had been killed by his father, allegedly because she gave too many parties. The father had been tired of it, she said. The Aikens were living beyond their means, and Anna Aiken went out practically every other night. One day, the father snapped.

Berendt listened, drank his martini, and watched the ships drift by. He was hooked.

"Gloriously isolated," Mary Harty called Savannah. And Berendt understood. This was a place that had rejected the outside world's attempts to improve it. In the 1950s, Savannah had discouraged Prudential from setting up headquarters. In the 1970s, it turned down the Spoleto USA Festival. The residents liked things just the way they were. They didn't want outsiders telling them how to live.

Berendt decided he wanted in.

He began spending more time in Savannah and less in New York. He set up a second home. He started taking notes. "I would inquire, observe, and poke around wherever my curiosity led me or wherever I was invited," he later wrote. "I would presume nothing. I would take notes."

What he discovered over the next eight years would become *Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil*—a book that defies easy categorization. It's part travelogue, part true crime, part autobiography, and part Southern gothic. It chronicles Berendt's immersion into Savannah during a sensational murder trial that would tear through the city's social fabric. But more than that, it explores the unusual characters who thrived in Savannah's permissive environment, and the unique culture that allowed them to flourish.

The book would spend four years on the *New York Times* bestseller list. It would be adapted into a film by Clint Eastwood. And it would introduce the world to a cast of characters so strange, so vivid, that readers would wonder if they could possibly be real.

They were. Every one of them.

But before the murder, before the four trials, before the voodoo rituals and the midnight graveyard visits, there was just Savannah—beautiful, insular, and hiding secrets beneath its magnolia-scented surface. Berendt had stumbled onto something rare: a place where the line between good and evil, between charm and menace, between reality and performance, was as hazy as the Georgia humidity.

What he didn't know yet was that he'd soon meet a man named Jim Williams, who lived in the grandest house in town and threw the most sought-after Christmas party in Savannah. Or that Williams had a volatile young assistant named Danny Hansford. Or that before long, Berendt would find himself in the middle of a story that would test everything he thought he knew about justice, wealth, and the darkness that can hide behind a beautiful face.

But that story would come later. First, he had to learn how Savannah worked—and that meant meeting the people who made it strange.

What kind of city could produce a man who walked an invisible dog, an inventor who everyone feared might poison the water supply, and a drag queen who called herself the Grand Empress of Savannah—all within the same few blocks?