The Druggist centers around a vulnerable workingman who becomes an unwilling witness to missing women, fraud, and murder when he is hired to alter a predator’s hotel-pharmacy. What drew you to H.H. Holmes’s story? 

I first read about H.H. Holmes’ Murder Castle not in The Devil in the White City, but in a book of short stories about Chicago’s seedy historical underbelly called Chicago by Gaslight: The Levee (red-light district), Haymarket Riots, etc. The Murder Castle just leapt off the page — to me, it was as classic a setting for a period horror work as the cobblestone London streets of Jack the Ripper, or Count Dracula’s castle from Bram Stoker.

Reaching the POV of the “vulnerable workingman” came from necessity: there are no heroes in the H.H. Holmes story. There’s Holmes, in all his utter terribleness, there are his victims, and there are his accomplices. This is probably why Erik Larson decided to put Daniel Burnham’s heroic White City story alongside Holmes’ for The Devil… I decided to make one of Holmes’ accomplices — in some historical accounts, his main accomplice — into an innocent. Ben is too busy struggling with his own problems to notice Holmes as anything other than a ticket to a better life. In the beginning, at least.

What did you hope to bring to the Holmes story that readers might not find in other books about him?

Firstly, I have found the vast majority of works about Holmes to be “let’s get matters straight about what really went on,” myth-busting, that sort of thing. I was interested in taking it the other way: submerging into the mythos of the time and place. The fact of the matter is, nobody knows exactly how many people Holmes killed, and to me that wasn’t the point anyway. And living in Chicago at that time introduced people to horrors every day — slaughtered hogs, filthy air, no agency for learning the whereabouts of a missing loved-one. It almost explains how people didn’t notice Holmes’ crimes for so long.

And, of course, everyone else paints Ben Pitezel as a degenerate creep unworthy of humanitarian consideration. But he was also a family man, and his family pays a nightmarish price for his involvement with Holmes. The benefits of conducting a drama from Ben’s POV were too irresistible to me, so I went with that narrative. I’m sure the Murder Castle purists will be able to explain all the facts I ignored.

This is, to my knowledge, the only account of the Murder Castle written in first-person. Some people told me I might have trouble writing it this way — some readers might get turned off — but I thought it was better than third-person in this one key area: the gruesome, horrid passages of what goes on, especially in the dungeon, have a warmth and feeling to them when Ben tells the story. In third-person, the reader is a sort of voyeur, and some of these episodes might feel cold and clinical. Anyhow, that’s why I chose to write it in that style. Plus, I got to channel my own inner-Mark Twain (without ever once using the n-word! haha).

How much research went into recreating the city’s atmosphere, industries, and social conditions?

Luckily, there is much written about this time period, both in regular textbooks and more colorful literary stories. The age of photography was also (barely) upon us, and this gave us snapshots of what things looked like (in black & white) back then. Hollywood also had its own obsession with Chicago, at least back in its early days. The nation’s first network of film studios was here in Chicago, so there was probably still some of that stockyards grit on those old producers when they started making films in LA.

In short, I didn’t have to do much; Old Chicago to this day stands for certain levels of vile criminal behavior and relatively primitive culture. It’s a pre-sold concept, and works that explore this realm often become very successful.

But I may as well credit the modern era of research, while I’m here. Things that would have taken me a week to find in a library now take minutes or even seconds, with how search-engine AI links together facts and details these days. It’s absolutely a revolution of access to pertinent data.

If you could ask the real Ben Pitezel one question today, what would it be? 

Well, the “real” Ben Pitezel is not the subject of my book. Maybe I can answer this two ways: for the character Ben from “The Druggist,” I’d ask him, “Is this what you really want, or is this what people tell you you should want?” For the real-life Pitezel, I’d ask, “How can you sleep at night?”

Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook