If you enjoy gritty police procedural mysteries, then you would appreciate this book. An “alienist” is what we would refer to today as a psychologist, in this case a police psychologist. Set in New York City in 1896, the description of the city is very detailed, and important to the plot. I’ve visited NYC, but never lived there, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the descriptions. However, I think Carr did pretty thorough research, so although you might not be able to navigate today’s city with his book, I am guessing if you found a period map, you would find most of the places listed.
The story’s narrator is a newspaper reporter who is also the long-time friend of the famous, genius alienist. So, slight undertones of Watson and Sherlock Holmes. A brutal murder has been committed, although the victim is someone that polite society could not even bring itself to acknowledge the existence of. The alienist believes it was the work of a serial murderer, and is determined to bring him to justice. He has been asked to investigate by the president of the board of police commissioners himself, a man named Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, that Theodore Roosevelt. While the team helping the alienist investigate the crimes are fictional, Carr weaves in a few other famous people as well.
The descriptions of New York City in the late 1890’s almost make you feel that you are there. The characters visit places as diverse as a millionaire’s mansion, the tenements inhabited by the city’s immigrant poor, and the even seedier parts of the city. They eat at places like Delmonico’s, go to the “new” Metropolitan Opera, travel around the city in horse drawn conveyances, and around the country by train. They use, for 1896, state-of-the-art techniques in medicine, psychology, and police work. Just the fact that they are trying to create a profile of the perpetrator is ground-breaking, as is their use of fingerprints and handwriting analysis.
If this was your family, how would you research them? One of the fun things about this book is that the detectives, once they have narrowed down their suspect list, actually use some techniques that genealogists use. They talk to relatives, check old newspaper articles, and go to his hometown. They try to determine his FAN club, go to Washington to try to find his army records, and investigate where he worked and where he lived. The 1890 census even gets discussed!