History of Crime and Social Control Max P.

Quayle

Caleb Carr: “The Alienist”, Random House, 1994

A century before the television craze began over ‘profiling’ and forensic science,
‘Alienists’ prowled the dark, seamy streets of the United States’ population centers, piecing
together fragments of evidence – and often, human flesh – as they worked steadily backwards
through time to find the perpetrators of the world’s then most heinous crimes. In his historically
appetizing novel, The Alienist, Caleb Carr attempts to introduce executive branch corruption
through a specific and sensational crime investigation. Secondly, he portrays a supply and
demand relationship between the highest and lowest classes as he delves into the seamy
underworld found within the New York flesh markets of the latter 1890’s.

In Caleb Carr’s pre-turn of the last century world, he has introduced a ‘modern day’
Thessaly – a city where there is an apparent absence of a middle class. The world he paints is
replete with all of the niceties which would accompany a middle class, but his characters – with
the exception of a couple of red-necked beat cops, and occasional passers-by – are carefully
plucked from either the vastly wealthy or else the abject poor. Carr’s purpose in writing this
historical novel appears to be to create a glimpse into that era of American history when the
study of psychology first became a science, but it ends up defining stark divisions between the
classes. As a necessary aside he contrasts the enlightened and forward thinking morals of New
York City society with its many forms of abuse crime: domestic violence, tenement houses, the
flesh markets, crime bosses, and corrupted police departments.

According to the acknowledgments (497), Mr. Carr seems to have mainly relied upon the
primary source research of other scientists and scholars. He also undoubtedly perused some
period newsprint to help form the landscape of the novel, which is rich and gritty, and has folded
this accurate setting into a vivid blend of fiction and ‘non’. In particular, his treatment of
Gangland New York captures the reader for its vivid boundaries and expressed quasi-respect
between gangs. It appears that great study was applied to the infusion of primary and secondary
source realism – Carr, is able to voice, in this excerpt, a deft handling of both:

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History of Crime and Social Control Max P. Quayle

“[Paul] Kelly’s gang had been named after the city’s toughest
neighborhood in an attempt to inspire fear, though in reality they were far
less anarchic in their dealings than the classic Five Points bands of an earlier
generation…remnants of which still haunted their old neighborhoods like
violent disaffected ghosts.” (41)

Real characters, enmeshed within personal vision; this flavor is typical of the detail found
throughout the work that shows the use of real ‘historiographic’ sources and a simple canny
relation to the New York of the day.

In the Alienist, I believe Carr is sympathetic toward the immigrants and lower classes. He
spends copious ink forming and interpreting the squalor and filth of the domestic experience of
the have-nots. By his own divulgence, Carr is inclined toward a subtle ‘it’s not fair’ attitude
aimed at the ‘opportunity-less ness’ (i.e., the absence of a path leading out) of the destitute
immigrant. Here, he plies his influence to our comfortable middle class perspective: “…a typical
experience: huge barrels of ash and waste…urine soaked stoop…filthy rag-clad men, each
indistinguishable from the next…the rear of the building…filthy walls…” he goes on to describe
a poor, abandoned infant covered in day old excrement and with no sign of a mother about. By
this and much more graphic reporting, he reveals his personal repulsion that his, and the upper
class, has spawned this disgusting offspring, this depraved humanity…yet has no intention of
addressing the human decay, never mind treating it.

The Alienist provides a valuable record of the late 19th century American real. As a novel,
certain license is taken in order to convey the author’s thesis – and as these liberties are
inseparable from the factual reporting – making the book prone to selling a one-sided vision of a
time were wealth outweighs reason, decency and charity. Per-versions are the supplied product
sating a raunchy demand from the elite class, and in this soil, Carr raises the spectre of the serial
killer. He infers that this sickened product of an ailing society is a necessary fruit of a pleasure
driven people. As for the pertinence to our study, I find it an engrossing exception, and not a
staple.