Murder, He Wrote -- `The Alienist' Crackles With History, Colorful Characters

"The Alienist" by Caleb Carr Random House, $22 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Serial murder probably is as old as human society. Caleb Carr suggests as much, recounting several grisly 19th-century examples in "The Alienist," his hair-raising new novel about a series of murders in turn-of-the-century New York.

A contributing editor to Military History Quarterly, Carr brings the dual sensibilities of historian and novelist to the story. At 496 pages, "The Alienist" is longer than the average whodunit and less dependent on the charisma of a detective hero, while the newspaper reporter-narrator is so nearly transparent that he seems to sink into the pages unseen.

Carr amply fills the gap with real-life characters Teddy Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, as well as a Hungarian psychiatrist, assorted colorful underworld figures, a major psychopath and a pair of detectives who are the most winning sidekicks since R2D2 and C-3PO.

Reveals city's dark side

Carr's strengths lie in the plot and historical color that bring this all to life. Anyone who thinks of New York as a deteriorating metropolis should ponder this meaty slice of urban history, which reveals the Victorian-era city as a festering stew of slums and wealthy privilege, rife with corruption, outrage and social ferment. And Carr chooses a side of this city so dark that most of its citizens refused to acknowledge its existence.

The plot is simple: Somewhere in New York, someone has a glass jar of eyeballs gouged from young male prostitutes he has murdered. The boys are all from recent-immigrant families, so young they are barely more than children. The killer chooses a site near water for each murder, then tortures and mutilates his victims before killing them.

Because polite society is loathe even to admit the existence of boy whores, the murders at first go unnoted and unreported. But Roosevelt, who was then New York's police commissioner, is determined to protect all of the city's citizens equally.

Enter the `alienist'

In deference to the delicate nature of the crimes, and his suspicion that police corruption may play a role, Roosevelt appoints a secret task force to investigate the murders. The members are a journalist, a trusted secretary who is the first and only female member of the New York Police Department, and newly hired detective brothers Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, who are the book's most winning characters. The team is led by an "alienist," one Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.

"Alienist" was the early name given scientists who studied the pathology of the mentally ill - those unfortunates said to be alienated from society and their own true natures. Most people didn't like alienists, regarding work with lunatics and criminals as dubious and distasteful at best, chicanery at worst.

Kreizler is an early graduate of a new course offered at Harvard by the psychologist and philosopher William James, and the novel turns on Kreizler's use of the new science to construct a profile of the killer and track him down. The doctor's hope is not to punish the murderer, but to study and understand him.

Critical to his success are the dissection skills and forensic knowledge of the idiosyncratic Isaacson brothers, who prefer the still-experimental science of dactyloscopy - fingerprinting - to the more highly regarded French Bertillon system of identifying suspects based on measurements of the body-part sizes of known criminals.

It was a heady time in history. Moving pictures had just arrived, and life was changing for everyone. In the course of the investigation, the novel ranges through real historical issues of the day: women's rights, police corruption, conditions in New York slums, and how Delmonico's changed American eating habits - issues that don't sound all that unfamiliar.

We also are given a picture of Teddy Roosevelt's family life that would not seem out of place on a contemporary TV sitcom. But above all, the book deals with the dramatic results of child abuse, a hot contemporary issue which, like serial murder, is as old as human history.

Hollywood couldn't wait to get at it, with good reason. Paramount Pictures already has bought the film rights to "The Alienist." And Carr reportedly has finished another action-adventure script for Universal, with another historical thriller in the works. Deloris Tarzan Ament, a free-lance writer, retired last fall as The Seattle Times' art critic.