Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

John Berendt's first book, published by Random House in January 1994, carries the subtitle A Savannah Story and grew out of the years its author spent living in the city.

Its central narrative is a killing. Jim Williams, a respected Savannah antiques dealer, shot Danny Hansford, a local sex worker who was both his employee and his companion. Williams said he fired in self-defence after Hansford, who was given to fits of rage, shot at him first with a weapon that was kept on display in the house, and the case went to trial four times over the years that followed.

Around that case Berendt assembles the city itself. He writes about the society of Savannah, Georgia and nearby Beaufort, South Carolina in the Southern Gothic key the place invites, and about residents such as the club performer The Lady Chablis, drawing both on the years he spent living in Savannah and on the stories its inhabitants told him. The book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 216 weeks, and Clint Eastwood filmed it in 1997.