Review: The Alienist

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.

How NOT to portray a character...

This last week, Geraldine McEwan (1932-2015) died. Many of you will not know who she was and, indeed, had I not known of one particular aspect of her career as an actor, I would be oblivious also. In her later life, Geraldine McEwan became familiar as the latest in a growing list of people who tried to portray Miss Marple in a television series based on Agatha Christie’s oeuvre.

For my money, you can’t go wrong reading Christie’s material (although maybe not her romance novels which she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott). If you’re running a Call of Cthulhu campaign and you want to recreate the atmosphere of the 20s and 30s, it’s all right here in black and white: the language, the social mores, the furniture. And with it, is the evil that people do to each other. These are good stories, well told, and well worthwhile for those wanting to catch a flavour of the times. What you don’t want to do, is decide to watch the shows that the BBC have churned out over the past several decades: this is a minefield of misinformation which will definitely lead you astray. Remember the episode of “Seinfeld” where George tried to avoid the bother of reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by watching the movie instead? Like that, but worse.

Agatha Christie was never happy with the attempts to film her two most beloved characters. She thought Peter Ustinov was all wrong as Poirot and she refused to acknowledge Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple, the only two representations which emerged during her lifetime. Her loathing of the Rutherford Marple is easy to see, since it was a portrayal geared for a certain period taste, and, for those with some deeper knowledge of her work, for a host of personal and psychological reasons.

Christie was one of a handful of women who emerged in the 20s as the Dames of Crime Fiction. The list includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; there were others but these will suffice. Each of them wrote stories in which the central mystery was unravelled by a detective – amateur or otherwise – who was invariably male. In their earliest stories, these detectives are arch and peculiar: it takes a few stabs before the rough edges get knocked off them and they become more acceptably real. Initially, Poirot reads like a Cubist painting; Roderick Alleyne is simply a name which no-one can pronounce; Lord Peter Wimsey is a badly-drawn Bertie Wooster and Albert Campion is a seething mass of Parkinsonian tics. Once their individual authors got comfortable with them, only then did they become ‘real’ people.

In Christie’s case, she began to loathe Hercule Poirot fairly early on. Even though he became psychologically more defined and interesting, she was never truly happy with him. Along with this she copped a lot of speculation that, as a woman, she couldn’t really be the author of such complex crime novels: the word on the street was that “Agatha Christie” was a male writer’s nom-de plume, and that this blowzy woman was merely some kind of marketing gimmick. In desperation, she turned to a new detective, Miss Marple, whose role was to demonstrate that crime – including murder, the most heinous crime of all – could take root in the most benign, bucolic landscapes, and amongst the most unlikely people. Having the crimes solved by a female investigator somehow made the possibility of the story having been written by a woman easier to swallow.

Along with this move, Christie also began to write herself into her novels. At one point we are introduced to Ariadne Oliver, a female writer of detective fiction who works alongside Poirot and Marple at various points. Both physically and mentally, Oliver is a caricature of Agatha Christie, even down to her obsession with apples. Again, this was probably a means of silencing her detractors who couldn’t reconcile the intricacy and precision of her plotting with the large, disorganised woman who claimed to be the author. This move backfired badly on Christie in filmic circles.

When the first Miss Marple movies were made, those doing the casting obviously had trouble finding a means of portraying their main character. Miss Marple is clearly described in the books: she is tall, reserved, and severe. However, the producers were trying to make a light film for a humour-hungry 60s audience. It’s highly likely that someone in the research department found a Christie novel in which Ariadne Oliver appears (probably 1961’s The Pale Horse) and suddenly Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) as Miss Marple makes sense: Rutherford’s ‘Marple’ is ‘Ariadne Oliver’ dialled wincingly up to 11. No wonder Agatha Christie chose to pretend these movies never happened!

During World War Two, Agatha Christie engaged in war work which took her to London and her experiences there resulted in the writing of Taken at the Flood (1948). At that time, after hours, she also penned two other novels, both of which were finished and then locked away in a bank vault until her death, whereupon instructions in her will led to their being posthumously published. One of these novels was Curtain, the last case of Hercule Poirot; the other was Sleeping Murder, the final adventure of Miss Marple. There is a world of difference between these two books and in order to avoid spoilers, those who’ve not read them should skip the next three paragraphs.

Curtain (1975) signals the end of Poirot’s character arc. It is the novel in which he commits suicide, after being forced to kill a murderer who has managed to perform the impossible – commit a murder for which no evidence exists afterwards to convict him. The setting is Styles, a country estate turned into a rest home, the same place where the first Poirot novel – The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) - is set and in which Poirot is introduced to the world. From all this we can see that Christie had a definite timeline in mind when she set out writing about her Belgian sleuth: there was a time when she thought, like Conan Doyle, to retire her detective to the country; but popular demand would not allow it. And so, she wrote his death and locked it away for later. Poirot was always older than his creator; it was easy for Christie to describe his infirmities and to portray his aging. It was not so easy for her to do likewise with Jane Marple.

Sleeping Murder (1976) is an anomaly. If it is read as the last book in the Marple series, it is instantly shown to be anachronistic. The first Marple stories are homey and countrified, set in sleepy environments which make the horrors which unfold there more dramatic by contrast. As Miss Jane Marple progresses, she becomes more crystallised, no doubt as Christie began to learn how to articulate her inner mechanisms. In a way, Miss Marple was another alter-ego for Christie, just as Ariadne Oliver was, and this shows through in some of the earlier books; it’s not until after the break – when Jane Marple becomes her own entity and Oliver is confirmed as Christie’s avatar – that Jane Marple really comes into her own.

Unfortunately, there’s that final book. In Sleeping Murder, Jane Marple leaps into action: she jumps about, she elaborates intricate plans to trap ne’er-do-wells, she rockets from hiding to accost wrongdoers. All of this bounding about, is the antithesis of who Jane Marple becomes, but it’s exactly what Agatha Christie – writing during wartime - would have done in her shoes. The other elements of the book were all decades out of date by the time it was released in the 70s, so those tracking the spinster sleuth’s career are right to be confused when they hit this volume. Really, it’s something like Nemesis (1971) that is the ‘last Marple novel’, not this one.

(Welcome back spoiler avoiders!)

So, Poirot had a developmental arc for his career from the get-go; Miss Marple’s creation was a slow process of agglomeration, betrayed by her anachronistic “last” episode. Not only does this final novel do a disservice to Miss Marple’s fans it has also – with one exception - derailed the attempts to move Miss Marple to film. It is exactly the depth and complexity which Christie brought to the table that leads people astray.

Jane Marple is a cunning old so-and-so. She knows that people treat her in a certain way because she is what she is – an elderly spinster. People around her expect her to be incapable of action, woolly-headed, imperceptive and gossipy. She trades on this fact, and it’s what makes her so diabolical. However, underneath all of this ‘playing the old dear’, she has a razor-keen mind and a moral compass that brooks no deviation. She’s never surprised by the gruesome crimes which she discovers; only saddened to have her understanding of humanity’s failings routinely underscored. She has no sympathy whatsoever for wrongdoers: in her (chronologically) later books, she refers to herself as the incarnation of the Greek Goddess Nemesis and is ruthless in bringing her foes to justice. She may look like a sweet old thing, but under that facade is a cold and vengeful vigilante.

This is what television and movie producers consistently miss. There have been four major castings of Miss Marple (I’m discounting Japanese anime interpretations, Gracie Fields’ 1956 performance, and also Angela Lansbury’s 1980 role in “The Mirror Crack’d”): Margaret Rutherford from 1961 to 1965; Joan Hickson from 1984 to 1992; Geraldine McEwan from 2004-2007; and Julia McKenzie, from 2008-2013. Rutherford’s performances we’ve already looked at and seen how they’re not actually based upon Miss Marple as depicted in the books, but on Ariadne Oliver. Geraldine McEwan’s interpretation is the next one I’d like to look at:

It’s clear from watching her in these movies that the writers and producers took no notice whatsoever of the development of the Marple character. They made the false assumption that the ‘last book’ would reveal the character at its most developed and they went from there. As we’ve already seen, this is a catastrophic mistake. Far from being fully-formed, the Marple character in Sleeping Murder is still largely in utero and not completed at all. This accounts for all of the leaping and springing about that McEwan does in the role, and all of the cartoon facial tics which she brings to the screen, something that the real Miss Jane Marple would never do.

Moving on to Julia McKenzie (you can see where this is going, can’t you?) the writers and producers make another fatal error. Miss Marple is not a cute, fuzzy little hamster in a woolly cardigan. She may play the sweet old lady when it serves her purpose to do so, but it’s not her real nature. In these shows, the whole crew fall for the big lie and McKenzie plays the fluffy spinster to the hilt, without a suggestion of the core of steel.

That leaves us with the only time that the powers that be got it right. Joan Hickson (1906-1998) was the real deal. For starters, she was tall, as Jane Marple is supposed to be. She radiated intelligence and perception, and she played the character with the reserve and self-deprecation it required. If you watch her in these shows, you can see her turning the sweet old lady demeanour on and off like a tap, which is exactly what Miss Marple does in the books. And she brooks no argument from the bad guys: she sees them go down and she makes sure it sticks. Don’t mess with her. If you’re looking for Miss Marple on DVD, it will reward you to find these releases rather than the others.

As a final note, it’s wise to be aware that the BBC – who have been mostly responsible for the filming of Christie’s books – have a tendency to play fast and loose with the stories. In the earlier Poirot tales starring David Suchet, they messed with the endings and often with the characters, in the foolish belief that those who have read the books might be bored at finding the same old wrap-up as that which happened in the novel. This is a mistake. The filming of Cards on the Table (1936), for example, was a nightmare of Frankensteinian re-engineering involving Superintendant Battle turning gay and was horrendous to watch. The later Suchet stories are better, particularly the latest incarnation of Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

(Obviously, the only person who can play Poirot is David Suchet - no argument. Ustinov was barely passable and Albert Finney was a caricature, not a character, along with everybody else in his version of “Murder on the Orient Express”, with the possible exception of Vanessa Redgrave’s character.)

It might seem a small point to whinge about an actor’s portrayal of a role, even an iconic one such as the character of Miss Jane Marple, but characters are built up from foundations. If the actor can’t grasp the fundamentals of a character, they can’t do the role justice. It’s not enough to affect the comb-over, glower and wear the tight white pants: you can’t be Napoleon if you don’t understand Napoleon. I’m happy if the fundamentals are there – I don’t see why they can’t dye Daniel Craig’s hair and give James Bond black hair just like in the book, but, given the rest of his performance, it’s a small quibble. Suchet gets Poirot. Hickson got Marple. The rest are just actors wearing funny hats.

In the final analysis, do yourself a favour and read the books. Several of Dame Agatha Christie’s books are regarded as among the most important works written in English, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937), Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and A Murder is Announced (1950). How can you possibly go wrong?