Word: savannah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Savannah these days, when people talk about "the Book," they are referring not to the Bible but to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the best-selling suspense yarn by journalist John Berendt. The true account of a notorious 1981 Savannah homicide case, the book is now in its 46th printing and three weeks ago, passed the one-year mark on the New York Times' best-seller list. It has been translated into six languages, including Norwegian, is being developed as a movie by Warner Bros., and has sparked a tourist boom in the genteel town of Savannah...
...vivants like the polo-playing Harry Cram to Williams' canny, football-obsessed lawyer Sonny Seiler to local eccentrics like maid Gloria Daniels, who conducted tours of her employer's mansion, occasionally supplementing them with renditions of Stormy Weather, the book is a portrait of a gossipy and class-conscious Savannah--mannered, monied and soaked to its soul in the finest bourbon...
...read books that have intrigued me, but nothing like this," says Dan Hendricks of Tyler, Texas, who recently went to Savannah to "follow the book." Like other students of Berendt's eerie travelogue, Hendricks stopped in at Club One to see the Lady Chablis, the former Miss Gay Georgia who provides wry commentary in the story on Savannah's racial climate. With the help of a bookstore owner, Hendricks also found Jerry Spence, who appears as a hairdresser to several other characters, and got his autograph. "Not a day goes by that people don't ask me to sign their...
Except for a few dissenters, the citizens of Savannah have welcomed the influx of Midnight enthusiasts. Locals give guided tours of the book's notable sites, like the Bonaventure Cemetery, where the homicide victim used to collect his thoughts and rendezvous with his girlfriend, and Mercer House, the scene of the killing. Predictably, Savannah's merchants offer plenty of Midnight memorabilia like maps and T shirts. A cafa featured in the book now serves "fresh salads from our garden of good and evil...
...tremendous popularity of the book is something Berendt, a former editor of New York magazine and current columnist for Esquire, had not anticipated. A native of Syracuse, New York, he got the idea for his book three years after he took a weekend trip to Savannah in 1982. But the first literary agent to whom he submitted his manuscript turned it down, claiming it was too local and uncommercial. "When I was writing it people asked me if I thought it would be a best seller," says Berendt, "and I said, 'Are you kidding?' I thought it would...