[Yardley is an American critic and biographer. In the following review, he praises Berendt's elegant prose and sharp eye in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.]

Herewith one of the most unusual books to come this way in a long time, and one of the best. Indeed it is two fine books for the price of one. The first is a portrait of Savannah, "a rare vestige of the Old South," a "hushed and secluded bower of a city on the Georgia coast." The second is a true-crime account of the murder of a young male hustler named Danny Hansford and the four murder trials undergone by his sometime employer and lover, Jim Williams, "a successful dealer in antiques and a restorer of old houses." No doubt it is this second to which most readers will be attracted, inasmuch as the case offers everything from sex to violence to voodoo, but caveat emptor: the first story will blow your mind.

Being a reader neither of New York magazine, of which John Berendt was once editor, nor of Esquire, for which he writes a column, I confess to being caught totally off guard by Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The reader ignorant of Berendt's skills is in for equal (which is to say ample) measures of surprise and delight, for his prose is both elegant and seamless while his eye is as sharp as a stiletto. He can make you laugh out loud and he can bring you up short, a splendid one-two punch all too rarely encountered in what passes for writing these days.

Berendt, a New Yorker, first visited Savannah in the early 1980s on what began as a lark but rapidly became an infatuation. He was drawn to the city by "the beauty of the name itself: Savannah" and by certain romantic images it quickly formed in his mind: "rum-drinking pirates, strong-willed women, courtly manners, eccentric behavior, gentle words and lovely music." In substantial measure those images were shaped by two people: the aforementioned Jim Williams, with whom Berendt speaks in a masterly opening chapter, and Mary Harty, an elderly member of the city's aristocracy who, in the second chapter, helps Berendt bring Savannah into focus. To wit:

"We may be standoffish," she said, "but we're not hostile. We're famously hospitable, in fact, even by Southern standards. Savannah's called the 'Hostess City of the South,' you know. That's because we've always been a party town. We love company. We always have. I suppose that comes from being a port city and having played host to people from faraway places for so long. Life in Savannah was always easier than it was out on the plantations. Savannah was a city of rich cotton traders, who lived in elegant houses within strolling distance of one another. Parties became a way of life, and it's made a difference. We're not at all like the rest of Georgia. We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, 'What's your business?' In Macon they ask, 'Where do you go to church?' In Augusta they ask your grandmother's maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is 'What would you like to drink?'"

A party town and a drinking town but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a wild town: "Savannah was a place of manners and decorum, first and foremost." Even so rakish a fellow as the singularly engaging Joe Odom, self-described as "a tax lawyer and a real estate broker and a piano player," a layabout whose goal in life is to "mix business and pleasure in whatever proportion I wanted," plays according to his own version of Savannah's rules of decorum. The city is sufficiently tolerant and easy-going to embrace eccentricity in a wide variety of guises, but always within the parameters of a courtly decorousness such as one might expect to find within the lyrics of a song by Savannah's favorite son, Johnny Mercer, whose music is distinguished by what Mary Harty calls "a buoyancy and a freshness."

All of this being so, it need scarcely be said that Savannah was shocked to the quick when word got out in May, 1981, about the killing of Danny Hansford by Jim Williams, a case that quickly disclosed "a plot involving sodomy, murder and theft." Once they got over the initial impact of the news, most people in the elite circles traveled by Williams assumed that he would be let off on the grounds that he had fired at Hansford in self-defense, but the prosecution chose to argue that "the shooting of Danny Hansford was neither self-defense nor a crime of passion but a carefully planned murder"—a contention accepted by all members of two juries and all but one of a third before finally being rejected by a fourth once the case was at last moved out of town and away from the various technicalities that caused previous verdicts to be overturned.

Berendt followed these developments closely and describes them with clarity and wit, but without strained efforts to turn them into a morality play. This is consistent not merely with the highly uncertain facts of the case but also with the worldly temper of old Savannah; the city may have been troubled by the case but not so as to let its distasteful details cloud the prevailing local calm. "We happen to like things just the way they are!" is how Mary Harty had characterized that mood in her conversation with Berendt, a judgment that in the end he is not inclined to dispute, as his concluding paragraph so handsomely declares:

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.

It's difficult to imagine that another writer could more faithfully or more keenly portray both the lush enclosure and its inhabitants. Some characters have Berendt's attention from first page to last while others make only brief appearances, but all are drawn with care and wry sympathy. Though his focus is primarily on the white upper crust, Berendt is attuned to the complexities of black life in a city that may have been described by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964 as "the most desegregated city in the South" but that in the 1980s was beset by black "anguish and despair." He takes equal delight in Jim Williams's lavish annual Christmas party and in the lush mysteries of Bonaventure Cemetery, just as he is equally comfortable raising a glass at Joe Odom's round-the-clock bacchanal and sipping tea with a grande dame of high society.

The objection can be raised that the clarity with which Berendt claims to recall long stretches of dialogue is suspect, but he covers this with a disclaimer: "Though this is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties …" His intention, he says, "has been to remain faithful to the characters and to the essential drift of events as they really happened." There seems no reason to doubt him; certainly there is every reason to celebrate his surprising, wonderful book.