Still Academic Without An Academic Setting?

In Part I of The Alienist, called “The Perception,” I noticed that this novel piqued my interests more than the other two. I don’t know why but it just seems more interesting. Perhaps it’s because Carr integrates historical content into the story or because it involves murder a great deal more than the other two(—not to mention the topic of male prostitution which I can never remembering coming across before).

Having said this, there are still glaring similarities between this academic mystery novel and the others. To continue from my previous post, there is officially a pattern now of the main character breaking off an engagement, being involved in an academic mystery, and finding love in the end, I think. (There is a pattern since this occurs in a third book. Somewhere I read, or heard perhaps on an episode of “Law and Order” or “Snapped,” that if an incident occurs twice it is considered to be a coincidence. However, three times establishes a pattern.) This is most likely the case since secretary to the Police Commissioner (Roosevelt) Sara Howard is introduced. She is one of the first women to work for the NY Police Department, but secretly aspires to be a detective, which is considered and inappropriate job for woman during this time. The narrator John relays to the reader that after his engagement ended, he asked Sara, “an old friend” (just like Wimsey to Harriet and Reed to Kate) to marry him while he was a bit drunk. Although “her answer was to [him] in a cab to the Hudson River and throw [him] in,” the potential for a relationship has been established, especially since the two are working on the case together.

This brings me to another point that in contrast to the other two novels, there are a great deal of people working to solve the murder mystery of Georgio (A.K.A. Gloria, his female name) Santorelli and its connection to similar murders of young boys involved in male prostitution years before (people including the three friends, Sara, and the Issacson brothers, both detectives). Doing so could help get a heartless murderer off of the streets. The other novels focused on the main character and a couple others trying to solve the case and didn’t try to find a murderer/perpetrator of this magnitude. Furthermore, there has yet to be a suspect targeted in this case unlike the others. Usually there are potential leads, but so far this book has gone in depth in analyzing the mind (and motives) of a person who could commit such unspeakable murders and attempting to understand the victim’s past, giving the novel an academic perspective.

This academic aspect is certainly also revealed through the historical facts included in the novel, as well as mentioning novels like Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. By including history, the reader is able to learn, thus like they would be able to do in an academic setting (despite the fact that this book makes no reference to academic settings, which I previously assumed helped categorized an academic mystery novel; then again Kreizler has his own Institute in which he considers his mental patient kids to be students…). For example, I’ve learned more about an alienist’s job, corruption, graft, and male prostitution during the late 1800s, and various methods of detective work. It was also very interesting to learn how fingerprinting (dactyloscopy) was not accepted as evidence confirming that a person committed a crime or was at the crime scene. It’s a fact taken for granted today I guess since cases can be solved fairly quickly if fingerprints are involved, unlike during these times when people were murdered and their murderer was never punished.