His Weakness Was His Belief That Evil

. . . Why Some Men Choose To Fill Their Brief Allotment Of Time Engaging The Impossible, Others In The Manufacture Of Sorrow.

I Was Born With The Devil In Me,' [holmes] Wrote. 'i Could Not Help The Fact That I Was A Murderer, No More Than The Poet Can Help The Inspiration To Sing.

It Was So Easy To Disappear, So Easy To Deny Knowledge, So Very Easy In The Smoke And Din To Mask That Something Dark Had Taken Root. This Was Chicago, On The Eve Of The Greatest Fair In History.

Beneath The Gore And Smoke And Loam, This Book Is About The Evanescence Of Life, And Why Some Men Choose To Fill Their Brief Allotment Of Time Engaging The Impossible, Others In The Manufacture Of Sorrow. In The End It Is A Story Of The Ineluctable Conflict Between Good And Evil, Daylight And Darkness, The White City And The Black.

Digression Is My Passion. I Love Telling The Main Stories, But In Some Ways, What I Love Most Is Using Those Narratives As A Way Of Stringing Together The Interesting Stories That People Have Kind Of Forgotten, And That Are Kind Of Surprising. The Problem Is, How Do You Pare Stories Away So That The Book Doesn't Become A Distracting Jumble Of Material, And Readers Lose Focus? In My Experience, There's Really Only One Way To Do That. I Pack It All In With The Rough Draft, Then Count On Myself And My Trusted Readers To Tell Me What's Good And What's Not Good.