In fact, reading a retreaded ““Alienist’’ turns out to be not a bad idea at all. Carr hauls in the same set of detectives,led by Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, the alienist (old-timey talk for psychologist). Where journalist John Schuyler Moore narrated the earlier book, this tale is told by Stevie, the reformed street punk who works for Kreizler. The time is still the last decade of the 19th century; the city is still New York. And again Carr lovingly re-creates old Manhattan, when street kids still went swimming behind the Fulton Fish Market and even doctors smoked. Presciently, the book’s most sinister touches are also its most modern:the story’s worst violence is supplied by the Dusters, a cocaine-gobbling street gang under the direction of a thug named Knox, an all-too-real character in the city’s annals. Before he turned to crime fiction, Carr was a biographer and historian, so it’s no surprise that his re-creations of 19th-century crime and rascality constitute the most assured parts of his books. If only he showed as firm a hand at fiction.
Neither ““The Alienist’’ nor ““The Angel of Darkness’’ is by any stretch a bad book. Their mysteries are intriguing, their characters are good company and the historical background is beyond reproach. The only thing that keeps these books from being first-rate is the absence of a first-rate storyteller. Carr writes like a man putting a book together from a kit. All the pieces are there, but there’s no unifying spark, nothing to drive the narrative. In 629 pages, there’s not one sentence that you couldn’t diagram, and not one that you’d care to quote. Worse still, Carr, for all his cleverness, can’t decide what to tell and what to leave out, so he puts it all in. Even a narrator as charming as the plucky Stevie starts wearing thin about the fourth or fifth time he’s told you that steak and potatoes is his favorite meal. Which is not to say you shouldn’t spend time with Carr’s novel. It’s just that his twice-told tale would be a lot better if its author knew when to shut up.
