[In the following review, Koenig discusses the colorful and eccentric characters in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.]

When John Berendt, a former editor of this magazine [New York], decided to spend some time in Savannah, he thought he could write a book about this decayed but elegant one-time capital of the cotton kingdom, a city so hospitable that it provides a marble mausoleum for any visitors who happen to die there. After a while, though, his research started to wander from the restoration of the Victorian district, or anecdotes about such past Savannahians as Conrad Aiken and Johnny Mercer. "We do our best to set you on the straight and narrow," a neighbor of Berendt's complained, "and look what happens. First you take up with folks like Luther Driggers, whose main claim to fame is he's gettin' ready to poison us all. Then you drive around in an automobile that ain't fit to take a hog to market in, and now you tell us you're hangin' out with a nigger drag queen. I mean, really!" Some might think, though, that the neighbor is not one to talk: He moves from place to place, tapping other people's utility lines, writing bad checks, and opening whatever house he is living in—including one in which he is illegally squatting—to bogus historic tours, at times while occupied with one of his lady friends. "Beyond this door lies the mansion's master bedroom," his loyal guide will say, "and today the editors of Southern Accents magazine are photographing it for publication, and we cannot disturb them."

The rather somber title of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn't suggest the stream of rococo personalities within, expressing themselves uninhibitedly in this city that is, as one grande dame puts it, "gloriously isolated" and likes it like that. Here old-fashioned formality ("This is a town where gentlemen own their own white tie and tails") is allied with an eccentricity so marked that the whole place seems to be in a permanent state of tilt. Besides Chablis (the transvestite who revenges herself on respectable black society by crashing the black debutante ball) and Luther (who is thought to be plotting to poison the water supply, and walks flies attached to colored strings), there are William Simon Glover, who, for a very good reason, walks an imaginary dog, and Harry Cram, a remittance man who punishes latecomers by shooting the hood ornaments off their cars as they come up the drive. With characters like these, you don't need writing that draws attention to itself, as Berendt realizes: Though his purpose is intrusiveness, his prose is impeccably restrained. The one exception is a chapter about a girl's sexual encounter with a psychopath; by adopting the girl's voice and thoughts, the writing occasionally becomes as lurid as its subject.

The evil, the equivocal, and the scary in Midnight are represented by that psychopath and a cool, courtly antiques dealer called Jim Williams, who lives in one of the grandest mansions in town and whose annual Christmas party makes uninvited socialites want to cut their throats. At the party Berendt attends, in a house filled with Fabergé boxes, Sargent portraits, and imperial silver, a Nazi historian asks an heiress if she recognizes the make of revolver he is carrying. "Of course I do," she says. "My late husband blew his brains out with one of those." Another one chimes in, "Oh! So did mine! I'll never forget it." The talk of gunplay is more than usually unsettling in view of the fact that the host is under indictment for murder. A few months before, Williams killed a young handyman who, he said, had shot at him and missed. The man's record of vandalism and violence was so long that the coroner remarked, "Mr. Williams probably did his civic duty shooting this sonofabitch." But Williams, it seems, had been paying the dead man for some decidedly odd jobs.

Considering the shooting a lovers' quarrel, the district attorney has Williams tried three times (two convictions are overturned on appeal, and a third jury fails to reach a verdict) before a fourth trial decides his fate. In the process, the enforcers of Savannah law show that their ideas of correct behavior are as relaxed as those of its partygoers. Official reports are given to the defense with crucial statements removed or whited out by the D.A.'s office; Williams is allowed, while awaiting trial and after being convicted, to travel to Europe and New York for purchases and parties. But in assuming that the jurors will extend their tolerance of sexual irregularity to those whom one courtroom observer calls "hermaphrodites," Williams makes the Oscar Wilde mistake of excessive urbanity. "We'd had sex a few times," he says of the dead man. "'I had my girlfriend, and he had his. It was just an occasional, natural thing that happened.' The expressions on the jurors' faces suggest they do not find this arrangement natural at all."

As the Williams case shows, behind the traditions and grace of Savannah can lurk something quite unnerving—as Berendt also saw when the St. Patrick's Day parade passed, with its Confederate marchers accompanied by a horse-drawn wagon. From the street the wagon looked empty, but from a rooftop he could see that it held the bloody corpse of a Yankee. In deftly mingling the frivolous and sinister, he has created an immensely entertaining portrait of Savannah high and low.