The Alienist

Before CSI became all the rage and every man became a couch chair forensic expert, there was a time when forensic science and criminal profiling are considered abominations. Fingerprinting had just been discovered and still held little weight in a court of law. Psychiatry is regarded with deep suspicion and women have barely just been accepted into the work force. Meanwhile, a baffling new breed of criminal has entered the American society.[return][return]Narrated in the cynical voice of New York Times police reporter John Moore, The Alienist opens with the gruesome discovery of a body. The victim is a cross-dressing boy prostitute, another abomination that New York society would not acknowledge in 1896. Despite the similarities to several past cases, the corrupted police department refuses to give it any serious consideration.[return][return]The only person who cared enough about what this means is Dr Laszlo Kreizler, a renowned alienist. Prior to the 20th century, people suffering from mental illness were thought to be “alienated” from their true natures as well as from society. The experts who studied mental pathologies were known as alienists. [return][return]Backed by Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, Kreizler gathered together what was possibly the first CSI team consisting of himself, Moore, Roosevelt's secretary Sara Howard, and two Detective Sergeants who happen to be brothers, Marcus and Lucius Isaacson. [return][return]Playing equally vital roles are Kreizler's servants Cyrus Montrose and Stevie Taggert, both guilty of killing but proven through the argument of psychology that they are reacting to their upbringing and environment. Kreizler defends them in court and subsequently employs them.[return][return]The story is heavily focused on the bold new investigative techniques to track down the killer before he strikes again. Their efforts are frequently hampered by the New York gangs and policemen who are taking bribes from them. There are also important members of society who have their own reasons for not wanting the group to succeed.[return][return]The best part of this novel is the process. Of course they do catch their guy in the end, but that is less satisfying than the journey there. I thought that I was in a hurry to reach the ending, but I've read other comments that said the ending was a bit too rushed.[return][return]I noted with amusement that aside from the makeshift headquarters, most of their brainstorming happens over a meal in an expensive restaurant. [return][return]Like all other Carr novels I've read, his narrator tells the story in flashback, which means there's a lot of foreshadowing that something is about to go wrong. This is less irritating here than it was in Killing Time because The Alienist is indisputably a more superior book.[return]return

4 to 4.5 stars. This book was not an easy read, and I definitely wouldn't give this a broad recommendation to the masses for a variety of reasons, but it worked out for me and I appreciate what Carr was doing here. I do think this book should have some trigger warnings which I will list at the end of my review.

Told from the perspective of police journalist John Scuyler Moore, we meet and follow controversial but eminent alienist (an old-timey word for psychiatrist) Dr Laszlo Kreizler as he is called in upon the gruesome murder and mutilation of a teenage boy in 189os New York. This was back in the time when alienism, psychology, and psychiatry are fairly new and controversial sciences that faced a lot of resistance from the public as well as the powerful people in charge, including the police.

The subject matters of this book are extremely heavy and can be triggering to some. Carr doesn't hold back or sugarcoat anything when depicting the grim reality of living on the fringes of New York City society in the 1890s. There are graphic scenes and situations in the book, and you also get the full blast of ugly prejudices that were not only common but even seen as “normal” back then. If this book had been unrelentingly gloomy and morose, however, I probably would have DNFed. The silver lining here is that the book balances out these harsh realities by also showing us people who care to change these attitudes and the systemic abuses that was so rampant back then. There is some underlying note of positivity, encouragement, and hope in battling against the circumstances, rather than characters simply wallowing in resignation and indifference. I was also pleasantly surprised that this book even manages to pack in some occasional notes of humour which never felt disrespectful to the subject matter or out of place.

Although the subject matter will always remain triggering, I felt that the graphic scenes of the book were generally quite far and few in between, only happening whenever a new murder was committed (and this only occured less than a handful of times after the first one). Plus, the murderer doesn't switch MO, so we don't get fresh horrors every single time this happens, we get a new victim with new circumstances for our investigation team to analyse.

Besides that, I feel that the pacing of the book is also where a lot of people might trip up on. It doesn't simply concentrate on the action and the mystery at hand, but also goes off on short tangents/lectures on the cultural history of New York City, criminology, and the burgeoning state of psychology during this time period. I didn't mind these as these topics interested me and I didn't mind the writing style at all, but I can definitely acknowledge that this wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.

I generally liked all the characters - I didn't find any of them obnoxiously annoying or unrealistic. It's just odd that the one I felt the least connection to was the titular character of the series, Dr Kreizler himself. It might be because he was depicted as an almost Holmesian figure, generally detached and incomprehensible from our narrating character's POV, although he does increasingly become more and more emotional and real as the book goes on. I did like that the team wasn't entirely dependent on Kreizler, however. Kriezler had his expertise, but so did everyone else - they weren't just sitting around being his assistants or simply doing legwork.

The narrator, John Moore, was definitely personable and provided some comic relief in how slow he was on the uptake in certain things, although it wasn't frustratingly so. His complete confusion leads to some (minor) misunderstandings which only provided more humourous moments. It's clear that he was meant to be the John Watson to Kreizler's Holmes, and even suffers the occasional quip from Kreizler about his incompetence, but overall he was a fairly straightforward dude that you wouldn't mind rooting for.

Sara Howard was probably my favourite character of the lot. The only female in the team, and also one with the ambition of being the first female detective in the NYPD, she's independent, resourceful, and a thorough breath of fresh air. Sure, I don't know how realistic she is as a character from the 1890s, and there certainly must have been some modern progressive ideals behind her creation, but I honestly didn't mind. I loved the scene where she pulls a pistol on the team when they're trying to skirt around saying "shit" in front of her just because she's a lady.

I also really enjoyed the Isaacson brothers, who brought some unexpected comedy relief to the group - at least at the beginning anyway. It is through them that we learn a lot more about criminology and what techniques were most commonly used in the 1890s. For example, I never knew anthropometry was a widely accepted thing at the time, where identification of criminals was done by comparing measurements such as foot size, femur length, etc. while dactyloscopy (or, as we call it, fingerprinting) was seen as unsound and controversial at the time.

The central mystery was fairly complex and I was pretty satisfied with the pacing of it. I didn't feel like any part dragged, but that might also be because we spend half the time also dealing with the secondary threat of the people in power attempting to obstruct the investigation, and how it may not actually be in the interests of the rich and powerful if the crime was solved. That was a further opportunity for Carr to delve into the sociology of NYC at the time, and that was pretty interesting to read.

Overall, I thought that this was a very well-written and structured mystery that tackled much more about American history and culture than simply having investigators solve an isolated crime. It does, however, pack a lot of punches in terms of trigger topics and graphic scenes, so I wouldn't give it a blanket recommendation to everyone. If you could tolerate reading about the following trigger topics, and are interested in criminal psychology and investigation techniques from the late 19th century, this is certainly a book to check out.

Trigger warnings: Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children, child prostitution, graphic bodily mutilation and murders, rape