THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS
By Caleb Carr
Random House, 629 pages, $25.95
Here’s the formula for Caleb Carr’s fiction, straight from the mouth of the inimitable Dr. Laszlo Kreizler: “Kindly pull yourself together. We’ve had important develop
ments, and now that you’re here, we can all go down to Number 808 and review them together.”
Yes, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is back, and once again gathered around him at 808 Broadway is the faithful band of charming outcasts who first stepped onto the turn-of-the-century New York stage in Carr’s best-selling, grisly romp, “The Alienist.” Here’s Stevie, the juvenile delinquent steered straight by Kreizler’s tutelage and care. Here’s the feminist Sara Howard, now a private eye for battered and abandoned women. Here are the quarreling Jewish police detectives, the brothers Isaacson. Here’s the burly Cyrus Montrose, a black man rescued by Kreizler from the justice system’s blind wrath. Here’s John Moore, the bumbling and bedeviled and comically chauvinist journalist.
And here’s New York circa 1897, city of unparalleled corruption and splendor, city of fine dining and seedy taverns, city of street gangs like the Dusters with their oh-so-evil boss, Ding Dong. Yes, New York. City of murder most foul, of the criminal mind that can be stopped only by someone who can plumb that mind’s horrible and damaged depths, someone who can understand the true significance of childhood trauma–the ways a mind can, in a calculated, rational manner, apply past experience to present behavior and lead a person to commit the most heinous of acts. And not just once, but again and again and again.
And that, of course, is when Laszlo Kreizler steps in.
The villain in “The Angel of Darkness” is Libby Hatch, a k a Elspeth Hunter, an apparently kind and gentle nurse who lost her job when her colleagues grew suspicious that so many infants in her care had wound up dying in her arms when no one else was there to see them.
And so the novel develops, narrated in the vernacular by Stevie. Evidence is gathered, a psychological profile is established, Kreizler and his compatriots pursue their leads–always, it seems, one step behind their target, their wits always ever so slightly overmatched.
Yes, it’s all formulaic, but what a formula it is. Few writers are as capable as Carr of holding the reader’s attention while his characters amuse themselves with highbrow discussions heavily seasoned with psychological and forensic minutia. Few writers are as adept at fashioning revelations that detonate, chapter by chapter, like carefully positioned explosions. And here, Carr deftly tweaks his formula a bit, transforming his psychological thriller into a courtroom drama, one in which Libby Hatch is defended by none other than the brilliant and ambitious young attorney Clarence Darrow.
Has Laszlo Kreizler finally met his match?
We already know the answer, of course, but no matter. Although Carr has a number of clear aims in the novel–to show that murderers are psychologically twisted but sane nonetheless, to display that the limited roles afforded women in our society can at times produce the most terrible of consequences–that’s not why millions of us read such books as “The Alienist” and “The Angel of Darkness.” We read them for confirmation of our worst fears. We read them for the simple reason explained by Aristotle so many years ago: because there’s something healing, something cathartic about seeing how misfortune can take hold of men’s lives, how the hand of fate is always poised to strike us down.
Near the novel’s conclusion, we are supplied the gravest of warnings on that score. “True to the Doctor’s beliefs,” Carr has Stevie assert, “the real monsters continued, then as now, to wander the streets unnoticed, going about their strange and desperate work with a fever what looks to the average citizen like nothing more than the ordinary effort required to get through an ordinary day.”
There’s good news of the most peculiar sort, for so long as the murderous and evil-minded are still on the loose, we might be hearing a bit more from Caleb Carr and Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. Their good work, it seems, isn’t near being done.
