![]() “This was the specific trigger … the fulcrum on which my life subsequently spun,” Larson said. One footnote mentioned that Juicy Fruit gum debuted at the fair. He started researching that, instead-paying special attention to the footnotes of books, “because that’s where the good stuff, frankly, usually is,” he explained in a WSJ+ Books talk. ![]() ![]() … And Juicy Fruit gum inspired his focus on the 1893 World’s Fair.īut while reading about Holmes, Larson did come across a reference to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive world’s fair in Chicago that attracted some 27 million visitors over a six-month period. Holmes, Larson initially dismissed him “because he was so over-the-top bad, and I did not want to do a slasher book,” as he said in a 2003 C-SPAN interview. The story-particularly its immersive setting-prompted Larson to consider writing about a real-life murder from the era, so he borrowed an Encyclopedia of Murder from the library and started looking for a suitable candidate. In 1994, Larson read Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, a bestselling novel from that year about a psychiatrist who investigates murders in late-1890s New York City (and the basis for the TNT television series of the same name). ![]()
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