The Murder Factory: Life and Work of H. H. Holmes, First American Serial Killer by Alexandra Midal. Sternberg Press, 96 pp., $20.
When I was a child, perhaps around five or six years old, I developed a hysterical fear of Sweeney Todd. This wasn’t completely out of character—I was an anxious child with a flushed, febrile imagination, all neurotic compulsion and nightmared sleep and fear of the shadows congealed in the corners of my bedroom—but the intensity of my horror, the obsessive, nauseating fascination it provoked, was remarkable even for me. There were other killers who scared me, real-life killers, murderers of little girls who at the time seemed omnipresent on the news and in the tabloids, but for some reason they didn’t affect me quite so deeply as the invented evils of the penny dreadful.
The terror was caused, in part, by the tale’s sheer grisliness: the frantic arc of arterial blood, lips greasy with human flesh. But more than that, it was the innovativeness, the ingenuity of the enterprise, that seemed to stay with me. The specially designed mechanical chair, the trapdoor, the production line of pie. Todd’s fictional crimes were efficient, modern in their barbarity, Victorian through and through. In their ruthless sublimation of humanity to capital, they were the Victorian epitome of industrial progress. (The 1832 Anatomy Act, which sanctioned the dissection of unclaimed bodies lying in state hospitals, made profitable work of body snatching, while large-scale markets, slaughterhouses, and knackers’ yards resulted in a London that was fetid and stinking, its streets slimed with effluvia.) Mrs. Lovett’s Fleet Street bakery, where the human pies are made, is no quaint kitchen but, as with the method of murder, a cutting-edge mechanized space. This is a factory, a place of mass production staffed by a single worker Todd and Lovett have enslaved.
H. H. Holmes was a successful businessman and inventor and a man who devoutly worshipped at the altar of commerce. He was the architect of his own technologically advanced house. He was the first serial killer in the United States.
Chicago in 1895 was in many ways as far removed from mid-Victorian London as was possible. This was a new city, a future city, a city of skyscrapers, not just one but many, skyscrapers that stretched their fingers in supplication toward their heavens. But some significant parallels to an older world and an older time existed. The Union Stock Yards, breathtaking in their expanse, was the largest meatpacking district in the world. Covering nearly one square mile, by the end of the nineteenth century it employed 25,000 men, women, and children and slaughtered fourteen million animals a year. The mass killing was a feat of unbridled innovation and astonishing mechanization, from the steam locomotives and refrigeration units to the (dis)assembly lines. Even the methods of slaughter were novel, from the Hurford Wheel—which allowed hogs to be hoisted every ten seconds onto a spinning plate, thus facilitating exsanguination—to the scraping machine that removed the animals’ bristles. It had once taken eight or so hours to butcher a boar; now, it took thirty-five minutes. In this hyperefficient charnel house, nothing was wasted—hair, bones, blood, fat, guts. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle (1905), his social novel-cum-exposé of the inhumane conditions of the Chicago meatpacking industry.
The workers who ensured this rapid transmogrification from living beings to consumer goods saw the exchange rendered visible in their own bodies, which were crippled and broken by labor. Punishingly long hours and dangerous working conditions were compounded by numbing stasis and ceaseless repetition as the worker, in a forerunner of the Fordist paradigm, was forced to perform a single task ad infinitum. In The Jungle, Sinclair writes of men falling into huge fat-boiling vats, “all but the bones of them [going] out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” Workers, then, were both fully and less-than corporeal, their bodies become pure commodity.
Those responsible for the ruthless expansion of the stockyards became titans of American industry, celebrated for their insatiable appetites, Cronuses of capital devouring goods, labor, resources. The dream of modernity made manifest, they were valorized at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, a paean to the splendors of American manufacturing and technological advancement. (This fair was second in notoriety only to the first-ever World’s Fair in 1851—held, incidentally, in London.) This was capitalism as design, the fair seemed to argue, capitalism as progress, and wasn’t it good?
At the same time, in the same city, an uncannily similar figure was building a private paean to the capitalist future. H. H. Holmes was thirty-three years old and had irises as blue as electromagnetic charges, fluorescent with kinesis. He was a successful businessman and inventor and a man who devoutly worshipped at the altar of commerce. He was the holder of several patents. He was the architect of his own technologically advanced house. He was the first serial killer in the United States.
In Alexandra Midal’s new book, The Murder Factory (2023), Holmes is not a societally aberrant figure but an adherent one—“as much the exponent of the American dream as Henry Ford or Horatio Alger,” as Midal quotes from Colin Wilson’s 1969 A Casebook of Murder. But unlike the Casebook or Erik Larson’s 2003 nonfiction book The Devil in the White City, which presents Holmes as the fair’s funhouse-mirror reflection, The Murder Factory doesn’t cast around for psychological explanations for this crimes. Midal’s Holmes is neither “an exceptionally intelligent pervert” nor a neuropath in thrall to incomprehensible yet undeniable motivations but rather the embodiment of the “dynamic of rationality and efficiency that is symptomatic of the shift operated by the industrial revolution and its handling of all things living.”
Holmes’s body count remains unknown. He confessed to twenty-seven homicides, although some of his supposed victims later turned out to be alive. He was, however, responsible for killing many people, including women employed as stenographers for his many disparate businesses, which included a pharmacy, restaurant, and glass-bending concern. Most of the murders were carried out at the Englewood block-filler Holmes designed and lived in; it was his creation down to the smallest detail, and only he knew its true dimensions. (Builders were often dismissed to keep knowledge of the structure’s labyrinthine layout a secret.) The Murder Castle, as tabloids later christened the place, was, Midal notes, “at once lethal, practical and convenient,” with “some of the most advanced domestic furnishings of its day, including a dumbwaiter, a human-sized furnace, and a wall-to-wall remote-controlled gas and electricity system” that catered to Holmes’s comfort and also to his homicidal schemes. Midal is at her best when she describes the link between the two, explaining with precision and deftness how rational, progressive, and efficient solutions enabled Holmes’s barbarism: how the dumbwaiter was used to transport bodily remains around the building or how new gas and electricity capabilities allowed him to remotely murder victims trapped in rooms that became incinerators.
She’s persuasive, too, when arguing that Holmes, in his fanaticism for capitalist optimization, was the equal or better of any industrial baron and that the Castle, like the Union Stock Yards only a few miles away, “obeyed the logic of mass production—of life and death alike.” The murderer, she points out, “made a profit from [his victims’] corporeal remains,” dissecting and selling their skeletons to medical schools; he made even more money from their property, life insurance plans, and assets.
The workers who ensured this rapid transmogrification from living beings to consumer goods saw the exchange rendered visible in their own bodies.
The Murder Factory weighs in at a slight ninety-six pages. It is divided into four chapters, themselves subdivided. This narrative efficiency neatly marries form and content, a constraint of design—Midal is herself a design theorist and historian—that asserts its rationality on the reader. Everything is clearly laid out, uniform and concise and utterly spare; meat shaved cleanly off the bone, all fat trimmed away. The ruthless logic of the production line is replicated even here. But while this can be an effective stylistic tactic, it leaves the book’s arguments feeling lightweight and raw. I often found myself wishing that Midal would develop some of the many intriguing analogies she raises and immediately dismisses; for instance, the late-Victorian popularity of women’s dismemberment in magic shows is given two sentences of fact-heavy historical summary and then never mentioned again.
The short format and rigid structure also seem to force ideas that should be coherent, such as the ruthlessly capitalistic way in which Holmes profited from the corpses of his victims, to coagulate in various different sections and chapters, halting their momentum. Points like these, which are the spine of The Murder Factory, deserve a more complete and narratively elaborated analysis. Instead, they feel jettisoned, at times, in favor of tranches of awkward academic-ese (possibly a consequence of the book’s translation from the original French or of Midal’s profession), resulting in a text that feels alternately thrilling and stilted. Still, she provides a compelling accounting of how the logic of rational, mechanized innovation isn’t so very far from the mass slaughter integral to serial killing—and how the latter might simply be the most successful iteration of the former.