[In the following positive review, Cunningham argues that Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is as exuberant and entertaining as most fiction set in the American South.]

John Berendt's first book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, is American travel-writing at its fictional-factional best. It's a bowl-you-over, enthralled-appalled trawl in the magical depths of Savannah, Georgia, the prettiest surviving corner of the Old South.

An editor and columnist from New York, Berendt knew the Savannah mixture by repute—as most of us do. On the one hand, the lovely old squares and homes that General Sherman did not burn down in the Civil War, the town where the poet Conrad Aiken, a friend of T S Eliot's, is buried and Johnny ('Moon River') Mercer came from. On the other hand, the place where murderous old Cap'n Flint handed Billy Bones the map of Treasure Island before he died shouting for more rum, and where Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah, did her dire worst down on the seashore with a watering can (she was pouring water on a drowning man).

Berendt dropped in for a short visit and got utterly hooked on the vivid contrasts of tone that still mark the place, the farcical striations of class and style and morals that comprise modern Savannah, GA.

The freaky acquaintance Berendt strikes up is as richly eccentric a bunch of gargoyles as any you'll find peopling a Dickens novel. There's Joe Odom, attorney, chequebouncer, piano-player and proprietor of the Sweet Georgia Brown bar, who turns his clutch of rented houses into illegal tourist attractions; his friend Mandy, crowned Miss Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) of Vegas; the black drag-queen The Lady Chablis, so free with cross-dressing advice and with Berendt's motorcar.

Then there's the glum chemist, who made no money from inventing the flea-collar and is said to own a jar of poison enough to kill off the whole town; the lovely Baptist pianist and singer whom Johnny Mercer called the 'Lady of 6,000 Songs' and who never turns down a gig; the gung-ho lawyer who owns the University of Georgia bulldog foot-ball-mascot named UGA the Fourth; the voodoo priestess; the snobby old trouts of the rule-corseted Married Woman Card Club; and many more.

Berendt and his story move easily along and across the social divides. An old-fashioned Southern darkness is not unknown among the antiques-buying, down-town-renovating, black-tie-owning rich folks Berendt gets to know. Anti-Semitism is the foundation of the exclusive Oglethorpe Club. The love of antiques extends with suspicious relish to Nazi relics. But still, money does immunise rather against the city's really seamier stuff. Until, that is, the Jim Williams scandal burst on to the scene.

Wealthy bachelor Williams is one of the chief restorers of Savannah's glorious antebellum housing, and a collector of Fabergé. He gives legendary Christmas parties top socialites would kill to get invited to. And one night in 1981 he shoots his wildly sexy male assistant to death. It's a rich shock to the town's rich. He pleads threats to his life and self-defence. Amidst a great swirl of homosexual scandal, he's found guilty. Four lengthy trials later, each one severely denting the DA's reputation for probity and mightily enriching the doggy-mascot lover and the voodoo priestess, both of whom are enlisted in Williams's cause, this verdict is overturned. But that's in nearby Augusta. There, it seems, juries are less appalled at learning about male hustlers plying the posh South's leafiest squares. Owning antiques in Savannah will never look the same again.

Some of the more enthusiastic American reviewers are hailing [Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story] as a re-run of In Cold Blood. It's not that, Berendt's criminal proceedings stand to Capote's like a muggy-day Dixieland shuffle does to hard-stepping bebop. But these wonderfully fat helpings of murk and malignancy are certainly as satisfying as anything you can find in Deep South fiction and, for that matter, they're as juicily prurient as those superb photo forays into American darkness that Granta magazine goes in for so tellingly.