BOOK REVIEW: FICTION : Portrait of an Eccentric (and Talkative) Southern World : MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, <i> by John Berendt</i> (Random House, $23, 388 pages)

Driving off the Interstate and into Savannah’s downtown grid, motorists come up every few blocks against a leafy, fenced-in square. Their straight-line progress dissolves into successive circuitous skirtings past shade trees and old brick facades.

Savannah is the city Sherman didn’t burn. Seeing what had happened to Atlanta, the notables went out to meet the general partway and bargained, persuaded or charmed him into leaving the place relatively intact. If Savannah can still exemplify the decorative and languid Old South, it is partly from its knack of bending to the new, slowing it down, distracting it.

Some years ago John Berendt, a New York editor and writer, visited Savannah and decided to stay, get to know its high society, and get it down on paper. Don’t tell them you’re writing a book, someone advised this literary Sherman, or they won’t talk to you. Luckily, he didn’t take advice so counter to the city’s supple tradition.

What he encountered was quite the opposite of obdurate silence. It is as if the word went out to regale Berendt with stories, each funnier, spicier and more eccentric than the next. If you toss enough rich food from your troika the wolves won’t get you, though watch your fingers.

“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is rich and curious enough to put a reader in danger of pleasurable liver attack. Its stories, furthermore, though shaped and no doubt improved, are true; or at least they are truly stories that Savannahians tell.

The truth of a place is also what its citizens believe or would like to believe. The sum is a portrait of a wealthy, anachronistic and insular society, reactionary and anarchic at the same time and hilariously individual.

One could almost be reading Nancy Mitford or Evelyn Waugh on the eccentricities of their own insular aristocracy. Berendt achieves their social comedy; what he rarely manages is the cold iron beneath--even though the central narrative from which he branches his anecdotes concerns a killing.

He gets the stories--one talkative society woman packed a thermos of martinis and took him out to the cemetery to dish the dirt--but I get the feeling that the storytellers partly evade him.

What he catches is highly entertaining. There is Luther Driggins, an inventor who works for the government developing insect sprays. He comes in daily for breakfast at Clary’s drugstore, and when he is depressed he leaves it uneaten.

Luther’s depressions worry Savannahians because he claims to carry around a bottle of poison so lethal that, emptied into the water supply, it would kill the entire populace. Otherwise he is a mild man, noted for gluing threads to flies and taking them for outings. Berendt describes Luther leaving Clary’s with a thread bobbing around him. He opens the door and the thread exits, followed by Luther.

There is the woman who is the major stockholder in a local bank. When she has business there, her chauffeur drives her by at 8 m.p.h., while a bank official jogs alongside handing papers back and forth through the window.

There is Henry Cram, scion of a rich out-of-state family who flies a plane over his friends’ houses and drops bags of flour down their chimneys. He emptied a pistol into his closet one bibulous night; each of his tailored suits has a neatly-darned hole in the jacket. Savannahian society drinks enthusiastically, Berendt writes.

Like Cram, Savannah gentlemen--and many of the ladies--are expected to carry a gun, Berendt suggests. When they are used to settle personal affairs, the authorities are encouraged to look the other way. One woman, he writes, shot her lover, cleaned her gun, had the body embalmed and only then called the police.

Thus the first-degree murder trial of Jim Williams--a rich antiques dealer, social light and, in the Savannah euphemism, a “bachelor”--for killing the young man who lived with him came as a shock.

It took two guilty verdicts, both appealed, and a mistrial before a jury finally believed Williams’ story that the victim had fired first. Absence of powder marks on the dead man’s hands was a problem.

Berendt’s account of Williams and his trials is the thread that holds his other stories together. At times it achieves a resonance that the other portraits generally lack.

In jail, Williams organized every detail of a lavish party for his mother, phoning repeatedly to make sure the flowers had arrived and the fountain was turned on.