New Book: Happy Hour is For Amateurs by The Philadelphia Lawyer

I finally finished Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and it was very interesting, especially as a Chicagoan who is fascinated by serial killers. It simultaneously tracks the planning, construction, and happening of the 1893 World's Fair with the story of H.H. Holmes, a serial killer living in Chicago at the time who made a killing (pun intended, motherfuckers) during the World's Fair by running a hotel of death a mile or two from the fairgrounds.

Holmes is very much a pioneer. He was a dashing, engaging man who could woo ladies and disarm men with his steely blue eyes and coquettish charm. Without Holmes, would there have been a Ted Bundy? I think not. More importantly, Holmes was the first in a long line of successful Midwestern serial killers. Seriously, check out this list:

• Jeffrey Dahmer (Wisconsin, Ohio). At one point or another, we've all thought to ourselves, 'Self, what you need is a zombie sex slave.' The difference between us and Jeffrey Dahmer is that Dahmer was a doer, not a thinker. He followed through, often injecting his victims with a paralyzing agent, then drilling a hole in their skull and further injecting hydrochloric acid. Instead of zombie sex slaves, what Dahmer often got was simply a dead Laotian teenager. And, of course, a souvenir skull and a wicked contact buzz.
• John Wayne Gacy (Illinois). My eighth-grade social studies teacher once told our class a funny story. Back in the late '70s, her husband was in high school and was all set up with a summer job at Gacy's construction company. Then he ended up taking another job at the last minute. Good thing. Many of Gacy's victims were young men who worked at his construction company. When Gacy wasn't raping and murdering young men and stuffing them into his crawlspace, he liked to entertain children as Pogo the Clown, get his picture taken with Rosalynn Carter, and paint. A misunderstood genius with a penchant for entertainment or an overweight psychopath with a penchant for rape and murder? The jury is still out.
• Ed Gein (Wisconsin). Not to be confused with the bartender at Canal Bar, part of Gein wanted to take a woman to a nice dinner and treat her right. The other part of him wondered what her head looked like on a stick. Guess which part won. He is also said to be part of the inspiration behind Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, Norman Bates from Psycho, and Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not too shabby.

• Dennis Rader (Kansas). Better known as the BTK Killer, Rader bound, tortured, and killed (hence, BTK) 10 people over a 17-year span. Following the lead of the Godfather of Modern Serial Killing, Jack the Ripper, BTK sent letters to the police and media outlets to tout his prowess. Of course, as often happens serial killers, his hubris outshone his common sense. In 2004 (13 years after his last killing), decided to start chatting with the cops again. He sent the police a disk after the police told him they couldn't trace which computers a disk had been used in. Turns out cops are liars. Using metadata, they tracked him down. With a face as sweet as his, he's undoubtedly getting raped right now.
• Michael Swango (Illinois, Ohio, South Dakota). As the physician who murdered potentially hundreds of patients, Swango grew up in Quincy, Illinois, was a graduate of Southern Illinois University's medical school, and later worked at hospitals in various locales, including at Ohio State's med school hospital. When nurses complained to hospital administrators that Swango's patients were dying at alarming rates, OSU told the nurses they were being paranoid, but told Swango to work elsewhere, which allowed Swango to go on to get arrested for putting arsenic in his co-workers' coffee, get blacklisted from pretty much every hospital in the U.S., and got to Zimbabwe to kill non-Midwesterners for a change. Eventually, he was arrested during a layover at O'Hare.
• Drew Peterson (Illinois). Two is a series. I'm just sayin'.

And let's not forget The Cincinnati Strangler (not to be confused with The Cincinnati Bowtie) and The Cleveland Torso Murderer (not to be confused with The Cleveland Steamer). And while he's not a serial killer, where would Kool-Aid be without native Hoosier Jim Jones?

The new book is Happy Hour is for Amateurs by The Philadelphia Lawyer, an anonymous blogger/lawyer. Obviously, this is something from which I can draw inspiration. I'm about 100 pages in, and it's pretty good so far.

Books read in 2010:
Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson