Another mystery that haunts this dark and sooty tale is that of Elizabeth Cree, the husband-poisoner whose life is connected to so many of the Golem’s victims. A former prostitute, Elizabeth becomes a performer with Dan Leno’s company, appearing onstage as both “Little Victor’s Daughter,” a girl, and the “Older Brother,” a man. Hiding her previous profession as well as switching between male and female identities contributes to Elizabeth’s feelings of paranoia as the book proceeds. In addition to being an homage to Victorian “bloody murder,” Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is also about identity as a shifting and sometimes tricky concept that can occasionally turn on people and hurt or even kill them.
Observational and speculative jewels are one of the great joys of this novel. I particularly like the hangman who dresses up in Elizabeth Cree’s clothes after he has killed her. Who has not speculated on the perversions of executioners? Or is Ackroyd simply playing into a modern audience’s assumption that someone who kills, even with the sanction of the State, cannot possibly be “normal”?
Even though it takes me away from pastures new, I will always reread Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem every year because it is a book that gives me so much. I always find something new in it every time I go back to it, and it has become as much a part of me as my memories of my grandparents’ gas lamps, their dark pictures of saints and angels, and their terrifying coal cellar where dead bodies, left by Jack the Ripper, lurked, awaiting my childish investigations.
A gray-eyed London rat by birth, Barbara Nadel lives and works in a state of chaos. Oddly, she is married and has a wonderful son. Author of the Istanbul-based Inspector İkmen crime series, her latest book, Dead of Night, has the nicotine-stained Turkish detective traveling to Detroit. Also out this year is the first book in her new London series entitled A Private Business. Based around an Anglo-Bangladeshi private investigation office in East London, A Private Business exposes a side of the Olympics site that isn’t about sport. Barbara likes cats, green drinks, and wandering around London. Visit her online at www.internationalcrimeauthors.com.
The Alienist
by Caleb Carr (1994)
REGGIE NADELSON
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Caleb Carr (b. 1955) is a novelist, screenwriter, and military historian, with a particular fascination for the late nineteenth century in his fiction, most notably in The Alienist (1994) and its sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997). Carr grew up on a tough block of the Lower East Side of New York. He has said that the violence of the streets, and of his own home, gave him insights into such behavior. At the age of nineteen his father, the journalist Lucien Carr, stabbed a man to death for making unwanted sexual advances, and was helped by the writer Jack Kerouac to dispose of the body. Carr lives on Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, New York, his isolation moderated by his admitted preference for dating much younger women. “I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity,” he told the New York Times in 2005. “I spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.”
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In 1896, New York was at a turning point, a city on the verge. The modern world was being born in New York, where the first movie parlors had opened a few years earlier. The first automobiles had just appeared, and traffic was already in gridlock. In spite of trolleys and cable cars, and the Elevated Railroad—the city’s original public transport system—horse-drawn vehicles of every variety careened around town in the thousands.
Vicious newspaper wars were in full swing as readership soared, and every scandal was fodder for what quickly became the tabloid press. Corruption ran deep in the urban fabric: corrupt cops, corrupt politicians, all on the take.
It was also the beginning of an egalitarian age in showbiz, when at the fashionable Delmonico’s you could spot Mrs. Vanderbilt as well as Lillian Russell. Everything was for sale: women and children, sex, and drugs—cocaine, chloral hydrate, benzene. New York’s great port, its commerce and stock exchange, and the very rich that profited from it all, made Manhattan the financial capital of the country. Immigrants in their millions—Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Caribbean—came looking for work on the docks, in the markets, and in the garment factories, making the city the most densely populated place on earth. All that poverty alongside so much wealth, stirred up with profound political corruption, and plenty of xenophobia, gave it a febrile quality: a city about to explode, a population dancing at the edge of the urban volcano.
All this makes The Alienist a brilliant novel that grasps the period by its bulging neck and delivers it, breathing and kicking, onto the page. First published in 1994, Caleb Carr’s terrifying thriller turns the island of Manhattan into its greatest character. But this is also the story of a serial killer who is murdering those boy prostitutes who dress, and make themselves up, as girls.
The very graphically described murders are horrible—almost too horrible—each committed with increasing violence; the reader is spared no detail. The police, for the most part, take little interest. What difference if another “foreign” boy is murdered or not? Who will care? But then, this is a police force so corrupt that you can smell the bad flesh.
The book is narrated by John Schuyler Moore on the occasion of Theodore Roosevelt’s funeral, more than twenty years after the crimes in question have been committed. As the action begins, we learn that Moore and Roosevelt are great friends, having first met as undergraduates at Harvard, where they were also pals with Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. Roosevelt is now the reform police commissioner of New York, just years before he would become the first American president of the twentieth century. Moore has become a crime reporter on the New York Times. And Kreizler is already legendary as an “alienist,” called in to assess cases of both the living and the dead.
In the nineteenth century, as Carr points out at the beginning of the book, the mentally ill were “thought to be ‘alienated,’ not only from the rest of society but from their own true natures. Those who studied mental pathologies were therefore known as alienists.” (There is a lot of debate about psychological methods. The pragmatist William James—who taught the Harvard trio—is often discussed, as are the new Freudian notions then much in the wind.)
There is also Sara Howard, a young woman obsessed with the idea of becoming a detective at a time when no well-reared girl—no female at all—would think of such a thing, although it would not be long before the American suffragettes were on the march.
Together with the three men, Howard goes to work on the serial killer case. To avoid the corrupt cops, she and the others, along with a posse of eccentric minor characters, set up an independent headquarters at 808 Broadway, which overlooks Grace Church (the church in which the author Edith Wharton was baptized). When they break for meals, it’s often to the old St. Denis Hotel, on Eleventh and Broadway, where there’s a pleasant outdoor restaurant. All these buildings remain much as they once were, though 808 Broadway is now a pricey condo, and the St. Denis a building full of shrinks and yoga teachers.
The array of characters—the ex-killers, the prostitutes, the society nobs—reveals plenty about the times. And real people make credible appearances: Lincoln Steffens, the reforming journalist; Jacob Riis, whose photographs of the slums led eventually to better housing and health laws; Charlie Delmonico, who serves the principals (and the rest of society) with oysters and turtle soup.
Dr. Kreizler seems to have an appetite for ordering fabulous feasts for his colleagues in the middle of the task of tracking down the vicious killer. The aiguillettes of bass are done in a creamy Mornay sauce, followed by saddle of lamb, canvasback duck with currant gelée, some petits aspics de foie gras; and later, pears steeped in wine, deep-fried, powdered with sugar, and smothered in apricot sauce—all perfectly paired with the right wines! It seems to be Kreizler’s conviction that the best work is done over great meals—or maybe it’s just Carr’s own appetite writ large. Either way, I love it.
Interestingly, around the time
of publication, some critics complained about the torrent of historical detail, the discussion of forensic tools, the pages of local history, even those meals. Carr is a historian as well as a novelist, and it’s exactly this, the exquisite evocation of the city, that makes the book so special, so alluring, so much a part of the city landscape it chronicles.
You can smell the fresh peach on which young Moore breakfasts at his aunt’s house on Washington Square North, a bastion of genteel comfort. You can smell the stink of the unspeakable slums on the Lower East Side, the tenements where people are literally packed by the dozen into rooms with no windows, no ventilation. My own father was born here in 1903, not long after the time of the book’s action.
This was the great age of immigration. Ellis Island had opened in 1892, and millions of people poured in, most of them stopping in New York, where they lived in conditions among the worst on earth.
I can no longer pass Cooper Square, or the Bowery, without thinking of Carr’s huge cast of down-and-outs, of criminals and cops. Carr’s city, even if it includes opera at the Met, and outings to the theater, is a murderous place. It’s not so much the murders themselves that contain the book’s true horror; it’s the living conditions, the very feel of the seedy rooms where prostitutes took their clients, the stink of the slums.
True, the murders—and the revelation of the killer—are enough to satisfy those readers who go to books for plot. The characters do their job. For me, though, it’s the way The Alienist tells the story of New York at a moment of tremendous change that enthralls.
People think of New York as a new city, the iconic city of now and the future, of skyscrapers and money, of penthouses and finance houses. It is, in fact, when you take the time to look around a corner, or over the rooftops, a profoundly nineteenth-century town, one that was just coming into its own in the 1890s. The subway was being dug. The Williamsburg Bridge was going up. A cable car ran over the Brooklyn Bridge, joining the two cities. These great engineering feats—the bridges and tunnels, the subways and train stations—were as much a part of the Victorian imagination as London’s railway stations.
Many of the killings in The Alienist take place near water: on the building site for the new Williamsburg Bridge, at Castle Clinton near the Battery and the river. Manhattan is an island; the city is an archipelago. Carr knows his city.
One of the grand landmarks of the era was the city reservoir, where the terrifying finale of the book takes place. It stood where the Forty-second Street library now stands. It was immense. High walls marked it, with turrets and control towers. People strolled on its ramparts. It has captured the imagination of many writers, among them E. L. Doctorow in his wonderful novel The Waterworks.
Having just reread The Alienist, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own neighborhood. The building where I have a loft went up in 1881, in what is now SoHo, where tourists ogle the Louis Vuittons and buy ice cream for four bucks, then walk a few blocks to Mulberry at Bleecker. This, Carr writes, “marked the heart of a jungle of tenements, brothels, concert halls, saloons, and gambling houses.” It also had, he notes, the carnival atmosphere of a brutal Roman circus.
A space as small and dense as Manhattan Island is like an ongoing archaeological dig. You can only go up or down in Manhattan, so you build higher, and look deeper, and uncover these layers or transform them into something else. Everybody complains about change, but there is nothing else in this city. If you fail to embrace it, you end up like the late nineteenth-century Cassandra who announced that—and this seems utterly true in The Alienist, where horse-drawn vehicles thrive in their thousands—the city would soon disappear in an environmental disaster made up entirely of the overwhelming quantities of horse manure.
Reggie Nadelson was born, raised, and lives in downtown Manhattan. Once in a while she leaves New York and visits other places, and has lived in London, Paris, and Northern California. A journalist by trade, she has worked for newspapers and magazines in London and New York, and is currently a travel writer for Travel + Leisure. Her 1991 book, Comrade Rockstar, has been sold to Tom Hanks who has plans to turn it into a feature film. Blood Count, her ninth mystery in the Artie Cohen series, which takes place in Harlem, was published in 2010. Most of her books are set in New York because she doesn’t really know about much else, though she likes the movies a lot, and has worked on a couple of documentaries for the BBC. In Manhattan ’62, her forthcoming novel, her new hero is Detective Patrick Arthur John Declan Wynne. He is Irish. He likes Irish whiskey a lot. Visit him online at www.reggienadelson.com.
The Man Who Smiled
by Henning Mankell (1994)
ANN CLEEVES
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Henning Mankell (b. 1948) is a Swedish author best known for his Ystad-based police inspector Kurt Wallander, who featured in nine novels in total, along with a collection of novellas, The Pyramid (2008). The first novel, Faceless Killers, appeared in 1991; Mankell’s final Wallander mystery, The Troubled Man, was published in 2009. A prolific writer, Mankell has also published nonseries crime titles, including Kennedy’s Brain (2005) and The Man from Beijing (2007); a further twelve literary novels, beginning with his debut Vettvillingen in 1977; and two series of books for children and young adults. He has also written more than forty plays and a number of screenplay adaptations for TV. Among the many awards Mankell has won are the Glass Key award for Faceless Killers in 1992, and the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Sidetracked in 1995.
* * *
Henning Mankell was the first Scandinavian crime writer I read. His books were translated and readily available long before Larsson or Nesbø became best sellers. Of course, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were there before him, but Mankell was mainstream and popular and set the tone for the much-mocked Nordic gloom. His central character, Kurt Wallander, is a classic flawed detective, divorced, troubled, and intuitive. Wallander drinks too much, and rages against the system, but is honorable almost beyond credibility. His team—Ann-Britt Höglund, Svedberg, Martinsson—along with Nyberg the pathologist, Åkeson the prosecutor, and Björk, the team’s boss—are well drawn and convincing. I enjoy the books particularly because of the interaction between these colleagues, the tensions and petty professional jealousies. The relationship between Wallander and Ann-Britt, the golden girl just from college, is especially strong. Mankell’s stories are set against the flat farmland and dunes of Skåne in southern Sweden. This is small-town territory, populated by farmers and traditional businessmen. Mankell gave me a taste for translated crime fiction and since then it’s become my reading passion. The translation of Mankell’s work—the majority translated by Laurie Thompson—is clear and unobtrusive.
The Man Who Smiled isn’t Mankell’s most famous book. That’s probably Sidetracked, which won the Gold Dagger. Sidetracked has an iconic initial scene with a girl running around a field of bright yellow rape and setting fire to herself. That’s memorable, and not just because Kenneth Branagh chose it to start his television adaptation of the series, Wallander. But I think The Man Who Smiled is classic Mankell. If only one of his books were to be remembered, then this would tell you all that you need to know about Kurt Wallander and his creator.
In one sense the plot is preposterous, a crazy conspiracy theory involving big business, a trade in body organs, a gothic castle, and a ruthless rich man. And there is no mystery, no surprise ending. While the rest of the book is told from the point of view of Kurt Wallander, for the first few pages we are inside the head of Gustaf Torstensson, the first murder victim, and he shares his concerns and explains the reasons why he must die. The individuals responsible for the murder have no psychological depth. Really, we have no understanding of their personal backgrounds or their relationships. Yet I found this book compelling. I continued reading it at almost one sitting, not because I needed to understand the shadowy figures of capitalist evil, but because I wanted to spend time with the haunted introvert Wallander, and witness his triumph.
Mankell is brilliant
on early visual scenes. In The Man Who Smiled it’s foggy, and Torstensson, an elderly lawyer, is driving slowly and carefully along a country road. He’s just come from a meeting and runs through his problems in his head. A fraud has been committed and he’s implicated because he hasn’t reported it. It is a sin of omission, not commission. He’s anxious about the consequences and worries that he’s being followed, but there are no headlights behind him. Then, in the middle of the road ahead of him, he sees a chair, standing like a throne, blocking his way. And sitting on the chair is an effigy. This is a great way to start the novel and to hook the reader.
We first meet Wallander on a beach in Denmark. He’s on sick leave. In a previous novel he killed a man in the line of duty and he’s had a breakdown fueled by alcohol and self-loathing. The holiday by the seaside is a kind of recuperation. Then, out of the blue, he has a visitor. Sten Torstensson is the son of Gustaf, a lawyer like his father. He and Wallander are not exactly friends, but they’ve worked together, and he needs Wallander’s help. His father’s death has been put down as a car accident—an elderly man driving too quickly in the fog—but Sten can’t accept that. He wants Wallander to look more closely into the case, but the detective refuses. He has almost decided to leave the police. It is only when he returns to Ystad and reads that Sten has also been killed, apparently murdered during a burglary, that he decides to become involved. He returns to work to head up the murder investigation.
The book was written in the early ’90s but its preoccupations seem contemporary. This is a book about the dangers of globalization and corporate greed, the complicated web of finance that makes it almost impossible to pin responsibility for fraud on any individual. We might think of Sweden as almost utopian, compassionate, and organized for the benefit of its citizens, but Mankell often mourns the old ideals, describing a community that has become fractured, self-serving, and intolerant. Wallander’s enemy, the eponymous man who smiled, is entirely without compassion or morality. He is Harderberg, the head of a business empire who has set up his headquarters in Farnholm Castle in Skåne. The castle is appropriate—Mankell describes Harderberg as “a man whose power was not unlike that of a medieval prince.”