SOURCE: "That's What We Like about the South," in New York Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 2, January 10, 1994, pp. 57-8.

[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...