The title is worthy of Tennessee Williams.
LAMB: Who named "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"?
Mr. BERENDT: Well, that's the title I came up with. Because I was an editor at Esquire, we always spent a lot of time thinking of just the right title for the pieces. And so I gave all of my chapters titles, just to add more atmosphere. Well, in one of the chapters I go with the murdered defendant and his voodoo priestess--I mean, a law--a very expensive lawyer, but he also hedged his bets and hired a voodoo priestess. Well, she took us to what she called the flower garden, because he wanted her to put a curse on a district attorney. So--there it is, Chapter 18, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."
Well, she said to me and to him, `We're going to go to the garden,' she said, which is the graveyard. And she said, `We have to go at dead time. Now you know about dead time. Dead time lasts one hour--half-hour before midnight to a half-hour after midnight. First half-hour's for doing good. Second half-hour's for doing evil. Seems like we need a little bit of both tonight. We best be on our way.' So that's in that chapter. And I sat down, I wrote the chapter, I thought, `OK, title. I should call it "The Garden." "The Garden's" a wonderful image. She called it sometimes the flower garden, but "The Garden"'--loved the word `garden.' And midnight--I mean, `And at the stroke of midnight,' she said, `you can scoop up graveyard dirt. It's powerful stuff to throw on someone's porch to put a curse on them.'
So I thought, `Well, we were there at midnight. "Midnight --Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."' I mean, all of this seemed to have come from what she had told me. And I put that down as a title for a chapter and I thought, `Ooh, wait a minute. You know, that's--Savannah is a garden city of these wonderful squares, and it's got good and evil.' And I thought, `What could be better? I mean, `midnight's' also a very evocative word.' It's an eight-word title, very long--longer than most others. I thought, `Well, this may not be commercial.'
So when I sold the book to Random House, I said, `I'm not going to be a prima donna. If you don't think "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is commercial, it's too long, tell me and I--and we'll--I'll try to think of another word,' and they said, `Don't change it on our account. We think it'll work.' And on top of that, my editor said, `You're going to have to have a subtitle to explain what this is about.' So I said, `That's easy, "A Savannah Story."' And originally, that was going to be on the cover. That would've made 11 words. But the designer of the cover, Carole Carson, who's utterly brilliant, decided it didn't need to be on the cover. "A Savannah Story" is inside on the title page.
