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.