Review

Avid Netflix watchers and crime enthusiasts will certainly not have missed out on the highly acclaimed series, The Alienist, released in 2018 and starring prominent actors such as Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning. While many current Netflix crime series fictionalise true crimes, this series is an adaptation of the homonymous book series by the American author and military historian Caleb Carr. In the first book of this mystery series, Carr takes the reader on a journey through the dark underbelly of the vibrant metropolis that is New York. Depicting some of the wickedest minds and evilest acts of humanity, Carr presents his readers with highly eventful murder-hunts and newly probed methods of forensic investigation while also letting them experience emotional ups and downs along with his characters. 

The year is 1896 – powerful gangs, overwhelming poverty, child prostitution and corrupt police forces have taken a toll on the city’s population. To make matters worse, while in the midst of it all, a killer is committing unspeakable acts of violence on some of the community’s most vulnerable members. Confronted with almost insuperable challenges, the police department’s chief, Theodore Roosevelt, sees no other way but to secretly recruit ‘The Alienist’ Dr Laszlo Kreizler to investigate these murders;  a series of crimes which have been purposefully left undetected by some of New York’s most powerful bureaucrats, who are sweeping these heinous crimes under the rug to maintain control over the city and its citizens.

Initially, we are guided through the story by Times police reporter John Moore, who is called upon a murder site on Williamsburg Bridge. Roosevelt greets Moore upon arrival, who takes him up to the gruesome crime scene. The sight that awaits him could be directly taken from a horror story: the corpse of a mutilated boy dressed in girls’ clothing who lacks not only his right hand but his genitalia and – most horridly – both eyes. In the following months, it becomes clear that he is not the only victim to die in this brutal manner. There is a serial killer at work who must be stopped. 

When it turns out that the police department has no desire in investigating such a murder,  Roosevelt employs Kreizler – an acknowledged expert in the field of psychology and the study of mental pathologies – in hopes he can help capture the criminal by examining the killer’s psyche and the possible motives for killing. Kreizler subsequently assembles a group of people he can trust: John Moore, his most trusted friend from university who is well-informed about the city’s nightlife and underworld schemes; Roosevelt’s secretary Sara Howard, who is determined to become the first female police detective; and the Isaacson brothers, Marcus and Lucius, both detective sergeants and specialists in new forensic methods, such as dactyloscopy [1] and anthropometry [2].

While trying to decipher the patterns within the culprit’s modus operandi, various questions arise: Why are the victim’s young boys dressed in female clothes and working as child prostitutes? Why are the murder sites connected to water? Why does the murderer choose Christian holidays for his killings? But perhaps the most pressing question occupying Kreizler’s mind is what is in the murderer’s past to drive him to commit these unearthly atrocities? Kreizler is convinced that the killer is not insane and that the murders are a result of childhood trauma. The mutilated bodies seem to mirror things “[the killer] felt had been done to him at some point deep in his past”, and these crimes allow him to take “vengeance for the child he had been” and ensure “protection for the tormented soul he had become” [3]. During the six months of investigation, the team is always on the brink of catching the killer but (of course) continually finds itself encountering false tracks, dangerous enemies, and minor setbacks.

Caleb Carr’s period thriller is dynamic in that the book’s continual stream of clues appears almost never-ending—keeping the readers hooked while guiding them through a labyrinth of strange settings and personal tragedies in the chasms of a restless metropolis. While creating a broad picture of late-19th-century-New York, Carr creates a plot that is both eerie and disturbingly sensational by providing moments in which his protagonist investigates the dark psychology of human minds. One notable example is when Kreizler takes Moore to interview the notorious teen serial killer, Jesse Pomeroy, to reconstruct their current murderer’s motives [4]. However, some parts of the story felt too heavily constructed—the overall “trial and error” method the team uses in its investigation rarely results in any setbacks and becomes a little unrealistic. Also, when Dr Kreizler distances himself from the investigation after his love interest is accidentally killed by members of the corrupted police, it seems that the rest of the group is in a fix without him although almost all evidence is already collected. Considering that the Isaacson brothers are doing most of the – to put it bluntly, ‘hard work’ – and the fact that the involvement of Roosevelt and Sara could eventually cost them both their integrity and jobs, Dr Kreizler’s professional input and role in the investigation may at times be a bit overrated. Although he is a man of great expertise, Kreizler’s arrogance and personal experiences sometimes get in the way of winding up the case more quickly.

Nevertheless, Carr’s other characters are surprisingly diverse and progressive—see Sara Howard or Kreizler’s non-Caucasian employees Cyrus and Mary Palmer, who are both reprieved criminals. One must consider, however, that the book was released in 1994, and therefore, these accounts of progressiveness and inclusion appear to be written more to entertain the modern audience than being authentic for the late 1800s. This is also the case regarding Roosevelt’s almost blind trust in Kreizler’s psychologic methods, which is quite unrealistic, seeing that forensic psychology was not a serious part of crime-solving in the US until the early 1910s [5]. Still, Carr’s book tells a captivating story of a highly motivated group of individuals teaming up to end the gruesome murder spree of a traumatised soul turned serial killer. Though the final “who did it-moment” falls flat in comparison to the rest of the book, to me, the journey through the intricate plotlines is thrilling enough to overlook this weakness and makes the novel absolutely worth reading. 

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References

1. “Dactyloscopy” describes the science of fingerprint identification. Relying on the analysis and classification of patterns observed in individual prints, it has been discovered that fingerprints are comprised of a series of ridges and furrows on the surface of a finger; they also contain individual characteristics called ‘minutiae,’ such as the number of ridges and their groupings. […] Latent fingerprints can be made visible with dusting techniques on hard surfaces. —The Editors of Encyclopaedia, ‘Dactyloscopy’. Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Jun. 2017. Online available: https://www.britannica.com/topic/dactyloscopy. Accessed 10 July 2021.

2. Anthropometry can be understood as “the comparative study of sizes and proportions of the human body”. —‘Anthropometry.’, Collins English Dictionary. Online available: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/de/worterbuch/englisch/anthropometry.

Accessed 10 July 2021.

1. Carr, Caleb. The Alienist. Random House Inc., 1994, p. 174.

2. Jesse Pomeroy (1859-1932) was a real-life serial killer, known for perhaps being the youngest of his time. Being only twelve years old when starting his killing-spree, brutally mutilating little children who he persuaded in coming with him to play, he held quite an unsettling reputation. After getting caught by the police, Pomeroy was sent to prison in 1876, initially sentenced to death, but then commuted to life in prison.— Montillo, Roseanne. “The story of Jesse Pomeroy, 14-year-old serial killer”. CBS News, 13 Mar. 2015. Online available: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-story-of-jesse-pomeroy-14-year-old-serial-killer/. Accessed 03 December 2021.

3. Kumar, Sharon D., et.al. “Forensic Psychology and Its Role In Criminal Investigation”,  International Medico-Legal Journal, February 2021, https://legaldesire.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Group-3forensic-psychology.pdf, p. 3. [last accessed 18 July 2021]