CARR, Caleb, The Alienist, Warner Books/Little, Brown
& Co. (UK), London, 1996.
Octavo;
paperback; 616pp. Slightly rolled; some creasing to the spine and curling of
the wrappers; text block and page edges lightly toned. Very good.
Once
upon a time I was heavily in to Patricia Cornwell’s oeuvre. Don’t ask me why, because I really cannot account for it
now – I think I was just in the mood for something ongoing, a series of books
to read, something that would not run out in the short term, like Conan Doyle
or Dorothy L. Sayers. Those are finite – since their authors are dead, there’s
no more Sherlock Holmes or Peter Wimsey, unless you travel down the road of
pastiche, and that way lies madness. Initially, I enjoyed the goings-on of Kay
Scarpetta but, all too soon, I was being asked to accept too many coincidences
and stretches of credibility, and finally I said, “you know what? That’s
enough”.
Nowadays,
especially at the bookshop where I work, people ask me about Cornwell’s books –
which one should I start with? Which one is best? – and I have to shrug my
shoulders. In fact, not a single work of hers (with one exception, of which,
later) has stayed with me. I can recall the reason I gave up on them – the
serial killer nemesis who was orchestrating other serial killers to attack
Scarpetta, without them realising that they were being so manipulated – but as
to other specifics? Nada. My crystal ball tells me that, in a generation or so,
readers (if there are any still out there) will say “Patricia who?” in much the
same fashion that they now discuss John Galsworthy, John Masters and Michael
Arlen (go on: I dare you...).
The
one book of Cornwell’s that I do recall is the brash piece of
self-aggrandisement entitled Case Closed,
in which she boldly claims to have identified Jack the Ripper, a cocky exercise
which fails utterly to do the job it sets out to achieve. Given, as time has
revealed, that the Metropolitan Police of London knew the identity of the
Ripper but were hampered by a lack of hard evidence, and that those files are
now coming to light, it puts Ms. Cornwell in rather an invidious position.
Enough, I think on that score.
Another
reason I stopped reading her books was that, at the time, serial killers had
become something of a “flavour of the month”. Everywhere you looked – TV;
movies; books; graphic novels – serial killers were hacking and slashing an
exfoliant swathe through the jungle of popular culture and frankly, I was tired
of it. Sadly, I had just purchased a copy of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, mainly on the strength of its unusual setting – fin de siecle New York. A few pages in
however, the (mangled) viewing of a mangled body and the in-character
discussion of how there was about to be a long, arduous investigation to
unearth the psychological motivation behind such a blood-thirsty monster, and I
put the book down.
Until
now. Nineteen years later.
At
work these days, each time we buy someone’s old books, the Patricia Cornwells
go straight out the front to the “Specials” table, marked down to a handful of
bucks each. This isn’t perversity on my part – they still sell, but if we put
them on the shelf inside, no-one will look twice at them. Caleb Carr on the
other hand, goes to the shelves if he’s in good nick; if not, on the Specials
table. It was this staying power – the fact that he will still attract the
punters for an appropriate secondhand price – that made me want to look at him
again. I’m kind of glad that I did.
The
opening chapter almost had me putting the book back down again, I must say. I
blanched a bit at the thought that Theodore Roosevelt was a main character in
the narrative and that initial description of the first murder victim put me on
the back foot. Fortunately, Roosevelt, while ubiquitous throughout the tale,
isn’t a constant presence and wasn’t overused: the focus is four-square on the
made-up people which Carr presents to us and Roosevelt really only amounts to a
hefty dose of historical flavour. But back to the body.
A
dead person, bound at the wrists and ankles, propped up on its knees with its
face on the floor, is, on first inspection, not going to give much away: it’s a
dead person bound and tied. However, our main character – reporter, John
Schuyler Moore – provides us, without moving the carcase, with a full
description, the complete litany of damage to the victim: genitals removed,
throat cut, abdomen slashed open, right hand removed, eyes gouged out, &c.,
&c. Given that the site of the discovery is an unlit maintenance pier on
one end of a bridge under construction at 2.00am, my first thought was that
Moore himself would turn out to be the culprit, because it would be impossible to see more than half of these
wounds without interfering with the crime scene. He knows the intimacies of
the victim’s wounds without seeing them; ergo: he caused them. As I read on, it
became clear that this was simply a poorly-considered descriptive passage, and
I steeled myself for a barrage of plain bad writing from here on in.
Fortunately,
I was to be pleasantly surprised. Carr is actually a very good writer, capable of capturing his characters and their locales
through deft and clever wordcraft. As well, he manages to inject vast
quantities of historical flavour and information, useful to the understanding
of New York at the turn of last century, without bogging down the narrative. Reading
further, I became more and more enamoured of the tale, and I began to flip back
to that opening passage about the first crime scene and to regard it as
something of an anomaly.
Serial-killer
stories are not really my cup of coffee. In the end, unlike other detective
fiction, there is no real motivation for the killer – they’re just mad. They’re
there in order for our intrepid detective to have something to do. They
represent a faceless, motiveless, uncaring evil, perpetrating distressing
random atrocities to disrupt the steady flow of civilisation. Look, if I want
to read Lovecraft, I’ll read Lovecraft: the triumph of the serial-killer’s
nemeses is just a bandage to convince people that everything’s alright now –
good guys win; bad guys – as bad as they can get – ultimately lose. And if you
believe that, I know a bridge you might like...
I
prefer detective fiction where the killer is someone whom we get to meet and
examine as part of the detective process – a cunning individual, driven to
desperation and now cleverly covering their tracks. Give me Poirot any day,
instead of the gloomy, cynical, gizzard-rummaging Scarpettas of this type of story.
I’ll take my murders “country house”, thank-you, not police procedural.
Given
this, The Alienist brings something
fresh to the table: the locale. New York in 1896 is a bustling metropolis of
disparate cultures and classes: crime and charity (the latter often obscuring
the former) go hand-in-hand and Reform is tantamount to a dirty word. On top of
this, the academic field of psychology is a new and untested science, frowned
upon by the Establishment and its use is certainly discouraged amongst
crime-solvers. This forces our detectives to appear to break new ground in
designing procedures for investigating the crimes at hand (of course, Carr just
takes a roundabout way of getting to the standard operating procedures that
detectives use nowadays, but he deliberately underplays their effectiveness, or
structures them differently. It’s profiling Jim, but not as we know it). Along
the way his characters still earnestly try exciting crime-solving techniques
such as the Bertillon System (in favour of the less-acceptable and fancy new
fingerprinting rigmarole, which they also use, just for laughs) and checking to
see if the victim’s last visual input can be lifted off their retinas. Watching
them attempt to pin down the killer’s personality by means of his handwriting
was also a hoot.
Ultimately
though, the process whereby they determine who the killer is and where he’ll
strike next is a sound one, based solely on the tenuous psychological, or
“alienist”, principles of the period, which are also clearly enumerated. Along
the way, facts are assembled and the blood sprays wildly; the fact that Carr
keeps the myriad tiny clues and nuances of the killer’s motivations juggling is
a real high-wire act and very satisfying to watch. Because it’s not just a
process of putting pieces of a jig-saw puzzle together: as the group of
detectives settles in to work, there are hidden motivations, skulduggery,
misunderstandings and misdirections aplenty along the way, all of which is
engagingly and satisfyingly resolved.
In
the final analysis, this is a good entertainment – neither historical
examination nor penny potboiler. It’s better than the Patricia Cornwells and
the Kathy Reichs of airport fame, but it does smack of the melodramatic (which,
given the prevalent entertainments of the day, might be intentional). There
were some elements of sentimentality which I winced at, but on the whole, it
kept me entertained throughout its 600+ pages.
I’m
giving it three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.
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