Paul Weiss's Reviews > The Alienist

A marvelous re-creation of changing police methods!

In 1896, Theordore Roosevelt hadn't yet made it to the White House. As Commissioner of the New York City Police, Roosevelt was sadly aware that the gruesome serial mutilation and killing of young boy prostitutes would not be a pressing concern for the New York community psyche and the dedication of meaningful resources to finding the killer simply wouldn't be accepted.

Laszlo Kreizler, a controlling, abrupt German gentleman, is a staunch proponent of avant garde analysis methods and psychiatric research that have been met with a chilly reception and earned him angry opponents in the medical establishment, the Church, the city's political bureaucracy and the police force. John Moore is a New York Times investigative crime reporter and Sara Howard is the first female hired onto the New York police force. The Jewish brothers, Lucius and Marcus Isaacson, are skilled detectives and have been hired by Roosevelt in his first, timid attempts to bring ethnic minorities onto the force and break up the corrupt power block of the internal old boys' network! This unlikely team has been hobbled together as an ex-officio task force - probably the first ever - dedicated to bringing the grisly killer of these young cross-dressing victims of the sex trade to justice.

The deeply atmospheric search for the twisted killer moves sharply and easily from the sleazy, art deco whore houses of New York controlled by thugs and crime bosses to the plains of North Dakota and an interesting discussion of the culture of the Plains Indians and their interaction with the newly arrived white pioneers. Brilliant characterization; sharp dialogue; realistic and warm but never obtrusive or forced romantic interludes; colourful, fully detailed descriptions of Victorian New York society from the opera house to J.P. Morgan's board room; and, even a wildly, comic description of gentlemen in their cups taking crass bets at the local as to whether old ladies crossing the street can manage to jump out of the way of a speeding horse and buggy all serve to keep a compelling plot moving along at a brisk pace, indeed.

But the true beauty of this deeply satisfying novel doesn't actually reside in the finding of the killer. Indeed, at little more than the half-way point of the novel, the identity of the killer has already been well-established. What Carr has actually done, I believe, is to use an imaginative plot to present an exciting, fictionalized re-creation of the early history of changes in city policing as the world evolved from the 19th to the 20th century - the use of fingerprinting, forensic pathology and profiling; the discovery of the amazing synergy of a task force approach to crime-solving; struggles with the legal distinction between psychopathy and criminal insanity; the value of dogged, disciplined, steady police work with attention strongly focused on the fundamentals; the interaction between the police force, the media and the political bureaucracy of the city; and the elimination of internal corruption within a police force and the move to allow women and minority groups to participate.

Anybody who enjoys mysteries, thrillers, Victorian novels or general historical fiction will be delighted with THE ALIENIST. By the way, Kreizler's final decision to take justice into his own hands and act outside of the established legal system is a BIG, BIG clue that Carr would soon be treating us with a Holmes pastiche in THE ITALIAN SECRETARY.

Paul Weiss