Alienist Characters - Caleb Carr & The Alienist Books

New Character Profiles

Posted on October 25, 2013No Comments

As the most frequently visited section of 17th Street is the full character list, I have decided to slowly work on expanding it from a simple list of character names to include short profiles for each of the characters. Four of the main character profiles are now complete: Sara Howard, Lucius Isaacson, Marcus Isaacson, and Cyrus Montrose. Once the remaining main character profiles have been written, I will begin work on the supporting characters. In the meantime, a copy of Lucius’ profile can be viewed below while the remainder of the completed profiles can be viewed on the main characters page of the full character list.

Isaacson, Detective Sergeant Lucius

Appears in The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness

Detective Sergeant Lucius Isaacson is the younger brother of Detective Sergeant Marcus Isaacson and provides forensic medicine expertise to the investigative team. Lucius and Marcus were among the new police recruits hired by Theodore Roosevelt in his attempt to rid the police force of corruption, and were handpicked by Roosevelt to join the investigation in The Alienist due to their lack of loyalty to any of the force’s corrupt ‘old guard’ as well as their progressive methods in the newly established forensic sciences. We know little of Lucius’ background prior to joining the police force except that his parents were Jewish immigrants, he has one younger sister, and he went to medical school before joining his brother in working at the Pinkerton Detective Agency for a brief time. As with Marcus, he is a bachelor and the brothers still live at home with their mother for the duration of the novels.

Both of the Isaacson brothers are hyper-analytical and were drawn to detective work after reading Wilkie Collins’ novels as boys. Of the two brothers, Lucius is more prone to anxiety and can be easily flustered, but he also has a tendency to “grandstand” which is frequently the source of many bickering arguments between the brothers throughout the novels. Even so, the younger Isaacson’s competence is unquestionable and his skills in forensic medicine are an invaluable asset to the team. It is Lucius, for example, who discovers that the coroner’s report on a three year old cold case related to the murders in The Alienist was incorrect in concluding that the victims died of cut throats as he finds damage to the laryngeal structures on the corpses that indicates strangulation instead. In the same cold case, he also observes knife marks in the eye sockets that were overlooked by the coroner, thereby providing the team with crucial evidence that the killer used a particular type of hunting knife to remove the eyes of his victims.

Although Lucius continues to make these kinds of important discoveries throughout The Alienist which are then translated into a psychological profile of the killer by Dr. Kreizler, his role in The Angel of Darkness is slightly smaller as there are fewer tasks specific to his skills that are required of him. However, he and Marcus conduct the initial examination of Señora Linares’ injuries following her attack in Central Park, thereby providing the team with clues such as the approximate height of her attacker and the type of weapon employed, and it is Lucius who also has the idea for Kat Devlin to help the team by stealing one of Libby Hatch’s jackets for fingerprint and hair fiber analysis. Later in the novel, Lucius also helps Marcus conduct the ballistics testing and fingerprint analysis on the gun and bullets used to murder the Hatch children while the team stay in Ballston Spa, and he takes responsibility for presenting the ballistics evidence in court later in the novel.

The Education of Sara Howard – Part One

Posted on October 16, 20132 Comments

View Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of the Education of Sara Howard series.

Beyond the enigmatic Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the character that appears to intrigue readers of the Alienist books the most is the brave, independent, and feisty police secretary turned private investigator, Miss Sara Howard. Although we have yet to learn Sara’s complete background story, I thought it might be interesting to devote a blog series to examining her character more thoroughly based on the information we have been provided with thus far. Was the derringer-toting Sara Howard’s unique brand of feminism appropriate for the time period in which the books are set? What educational and career opportunities would a real Sara Howard have had during the late 19th century?

As we currently lack adequate detail about Sara’s background to overview her particular education and career choices as intended in the books, the present discussion will focus instead on what I am terming a “hypothetical” Sara. Specifically, throughout this blog series I will be examining the kind of upbringing, education, and career choices a young woman born in a similar decade and socioeconomic group to Sara would have had available to her in the late 19th century. Today’s post in the series will focus on our hypothetical Sara’s historical context, particularly the notion of the “woman’s sphere”, an ideology that pervaded upper- and middle-class American culture throughout the 19th century.

The Woman’s Sphere in 19th Century America

The Alienist, Chapter 5:

Back in the early seventies, when I was in my teens, [Sara’s] family moved into a house near ours on Gramercy Park, and I’d subsequently watched her spend her single-digit years turning that decorous neighborhood into her private rumpus room.

As indicated by John Moore’s quote above, in order to fit the timeline put forward in the Alienist books, our hypothetical Sara Howard would have been born in approximately the mid- to late-1860s. This period immediately following the Civil War was a time of great upheaval for women’s roles in American society. During the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, the idea that men and women should rightly function in two separate “spheres” was a core tenant of American thinking. Although women had been considered inherently inferior to men for centuries leading up to this point, with women holding no legal rights to property or legal standing in society, the agricultural nature of early America had made labor equality within most households a necessity. Despite holding subservient positions in the household, wives and daughters were considered an integral part of family farming and cottage industry businesses. They frequently learned crafts from husbands and fathers, and were often capable of carrying on alone if necessity required. However, societal changes resulting from the rise of the Industrial Revolution prompted a dramatic shift in the American home that changed women’s roles dramatically in the latter half of the 18th century.

Instead of households or small shops producing custom goods for small self-sustaining agricultural communities, mass production of goods through factories changed living and working conditions throughout the country. Money was now the primary means of obtaining basic commodities, and it became increasingly important for men in the household to take on the role of “bread winner” by working outside the home in the newly established commercial world to earn money for the family’s survival. With the rise of this new capitalism, a woman’s role in her household had evolved from equal contributor in the family business to that of a homemaker, and her most important responsibilities had been reduced to those requiring the “feminine” traits of patience, nurturing, and altruism: the raising of children and the care of her husband. The male sphere of the commercial world outside the home, on the other hand, was viewed as an aggressive, competitive domain that required men to act in less than virtuous ways in order to get ahead, and consequently the idealisation of women — or, more specifically, of wives and mothers — in writings of the day was prevalent. The image we have today of the docile, submissive, and loving Victorian wife who soothed her husband’s cares in the evening and instilled her children with good Christian moral values throughout the day originates from this period. | Continue reading →

The Line Between Fact and Fiction in the Alienist Books

Posted on September 25, 2013No Comments

It didn’t surprise me to learn that Caleb Carr’s agent and editor had believed him when he originally pitched the story of The Alienist as non-fiction (see the afterword to The Alienist’s 2006 trade paperback edition for the complete–and amusing–tale of intrigue and deception). Even though I had known the novel was fictional when I first read it, many of the background details in the story had such a feeling of authenticity to them that I distinctly remember closing the book upon finishing it and wondering just how much of what I’d read might really have happened. Certainly, I had known that Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, his principal investigative colleagues, and the murderer had been fictional, just as I had known the major historical figures featured in the book were real; but there were minor characters mentioned or included throughout the story who had felt real, but who I knew could have been just as fictional as the principal investigators, developed to meet the needs of the plot.

Some of the characters who intrigued me the most were the other criminals Dr. Kreizler assessed throughout the novel in order to determine whether they could be connected to the case. Indeed, the first of these individuals provided us with our introduction to the Doctor and his methods in Chapter 4. After speaking to our narrator, John Schuyler Moore, on the telephone–and deducing in true Sherlock Holmesian style that Moore was still in his nightclothes–the Doctor requested his friend read an article in The New York Times (while dressing) about a certain Henry Wolff who had shot a five year old girl in the head. The Doctor explained that he was to conduct the psychiatric assessment of Wolff later that morning at Bellevue Hospital’s Insane Pavilion, and he wanted Moore to accompany him on the chance that it would prove relevant to the case.

The original article Dr. Kreizler was referring to can indeed be found in the archives of The New York Times, with a date appropriate for the timeline of the novel (March of 1896). “HE SHOT A CHILD IN THE HEAD”, the headline reads, and the article goes on to state that the aforementioned Henry Wolff had shot Louisa Rudesheimer, the five year old daughter of Wolff’s neighbour, Conrad Rudesheimer, while Louisa had been sitting on her father’s lap. The two men, along with an additional third man, had been drinking in the tenement rooms where Rudesheimer and his daughter resided on East Tenth Street. The article indicates that Wolff had used inappropriate language in front of the girl that offended the father and resulted in a quarrel. Although peace was restored temporarily, the men continued drinking and Wolff drew a revolver, firing three shots into the air before targeting the five year old girl.

We can find another such example in Chapter 12, although in this instance the case appears to have been adapted slightly for the purposes of the novel. Specifically, Harris Markowitz of No. 75 Forsyth Street had been accused in the novel of murdering his grandchildren by poisoning their milk prior to gassing them while they slept. Even though the investigative team were already confident by this stage that the serial killer they were hunting was not a poisoner, they felt it might be useful to develop a “negative image” of the killer by looking into such cases; that is, they hoped that by being able to identify more clearly who their killer was not, a clearer picture would emerge of who their killer was. Once again, an article in The New York Times with a date that matches the novel’s timeline can be found that details a highly similar case; however, in the Times’s version of the story, Markowitz had not succeeded in killing the children and had only been accused of attempted murder.

So, if you’ve ever wondered whether some of the background detail in The Alienist or The Angel of Darkness have their origins in fact or are completely fictitious, it’s worth taking the time to look it up through whatever means you have available to you. Over the years that I’ve spent running this website, I can attest that doing so can provide an interesting insight into both the history of the period and the creative process involved in writing the books.

Did Dr. Kreizler really live at 283 East 17th Street? Part Four

Posted on July 18, 2013No Comments

View Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four of the Did Dr. Kreizler really live at 283 East 17th Street? series.

Welcome to the fourth and final part of the “Did Dr. Kreizler really live at 283 East 17th Street?” series. Over the course of this series, we’ve overviewed the origins of Stuyvesant Square from its earliest days through to the 1840s (Part One), read about the district’s most active period of development in the 1850s through to the early 1880s (Part Two), and learnt more about the enormous influence one reforming rector at St. George’s Church had on the district in the late 1880s and 1890s (Part Three). In this final blog of the series, we will be discussing why Caleb Carr might have selected the location as the home for his protagonist before briefly touching on how the district continued to develop in the early 20th century.

Why might Caleb Carr have chosen 283 East 17th Street as Dr. Kreizler’s residence?

I feel it’s important to start this blog by stating the obvious: as I am not the author, I can only hypothesize as to why he may have chosen the fictional address of 283 East 17th Street as the home for his protagonist–and, yes, it is a fictional address. As can be seen in the 1891 maps of the district to the right and below, the section of 17th Street overlooking the park that was described as the location for Doctor’s home is bisected by Second Avenue. On the western side of Second Avenue, lot numbers ended at No. 251 (originally the Hamilton Fish mansion, later turned New York Lying-In Hospital; see below), while on the eastern side of Second Avenue, lot numbers started again at No. 301. Nevertheless, by examining the district’s composition in the 1890s, as well as overviewing the proximity of the neighborhood to other locations of importance in the Alienist books, we can start to theorize about why Caleb Carr might have selected the location. In addition, as Mr. Carr had his own connections to the district in his youth, it seems likely that this may have also played a role in his choice of Stuyvesant Square as the Doctor’s home.

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