The Alienist (1994) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

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• John Schuyler Moore: John Schuyler Moore is a typical "New York Times" police reporter in the opening of this book, but following him in his first person view, his life gets a complicated because of his childhood friend Laszlo and a comidity of events. A little daft at times, but seemingly brilliant, Moore is a realistic character that is easy to like.
• Dr. Laszlo Kreizler: Laszlo Kreizler is truly the man behind the mission. His profound and innovative ideas for psychology at the time, does win a few enemies, but also an equal amount of admirers. Kreizler is a genius when it comes to making hypotheses and really getting inside the murder's mind.
• Theodore Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt is portrayed as the man of action he truly was, even before his presidency, which is were he stands right now, as Police Commissioner. Although only highlighted in the book, he still brings a more tangible feel to the cast.
• Stevie Taggert: Stevie Taggert "the Stevepipe" is a feisty strapling, caused by a rough life on the streets. As a former patient of Kreizler's Stevie makes his keep by assisting the master he truly cares about.
• Cyrus Montrose: Another one of Kreizler's ex patients, Cyrus has a nasty past, but manages to be a helpful servant to the group, always there in times of need.
• Mary Palmer: A third addition to Kreizler's staff of ex patients. Mary is pretty girl with the an unfortunate past like the others. She cannot speak well due to her childhood, but doesn't let that stop her determination to make her way through the once cruel world.
• Sara Howard: Miss Howard is the definition of an independent woman. With the high ambition of becoming the first woman on the police department, she has no thoughts of romance, and so devotes herself to proving that she is capable of detective work.
• Marcus Isaacson: Detective Sergeant and brother to Lucius Isaacson.
• John Beecham: An army soldier who may have some information on the case.
• Lucius Isaacson: Detective Sergeant and brother to Marcus Isaacson.
• Japheth Dury: A young man who went missing when his parents were murdered. It is thought he might still be alive.
• Byrnes: Inspector Thomas Byrnes, who created the Rogues' Gallery; notorious for the corruption of his police force
• Jesse Pomeroy: A serial killer locked up in Sing Sing.
• Patrick Connor: Sergeant of Detectives
• Ted Roosevelt: TR's oldest son, interested in owls
• Alice Roosevelt: TR's daughter, 12 years old
• Comstock: Anthony Comstock, notorious Postal Censor of the United States Post Office, who spent 20 years using his congressionally mandated (constitutionally questionable) powers to persecute zealously anyone who dealt in contraceptive devices, pregnancy abortions, ribald literature and photographs, and anything else that fit his expansive definition of "obscene"
• Edith Roosevelt: TR's second wife
• Georgio Santorelli: First murder victim in the story. Worked for Biff Ellison
• Paul Kelly: Biff Ellison's overseer; elegantly dressed gangland chief, inveterate gambler, amateur philosopher and social critic; ruled the Five Pointers lower Manhattan underworld gang
• John Pierpont Morgan: a man whose power was greater than that of any financier the world has ever known, who in 1895 single-handedly rescued the United States government from financial ruin; a man whose otherwise handsome features were counterbalanced by a nose that had been cracked, swollen and deformed by acne rosacea.
• Mrs. Piedmont: John Beecham's land lady -- briefly.
• Flynn: Sergeant
• Corrigan: Archbishop Michael Corrigan
• Potter: Bishop Henry Potter of the Episcopal Church
• Adam Dury: Add a description of this character.
• Harriet: John Moore's grandmother's maid
• Miller
• Ali
• Fatima
• Anton Seidl: Once Richard Wagner's private secretary, later the finest orchestra leader in New York (at the Metropolitan)
• the Eastmans: named for colorful chief Monk Eastman, a lower Manhattan underworld gang who controlled all territory east of the Bowery between Fourteenth Street and Chatham Square
• Hudson Dusters: lower Manhattan underworld gang on the West Side, who ran affairs south of Thirteenth Street and west of Broadway
• Mallet Murphy's Gophers: lower Manhattan underworld gang of 'cellar-dwelling Irish creatures whose evolution even Mr. Darwin would have been hard-pressed to explain'; controlled the West Side area above Fourteenth Street
• Five Pointers: headed by Paul Kelly, a lower Manhattan underworld gang at the eye of the criminal hurricane and just blocks from Police Headquarters, who ruled supreme between Broadway and Bowery and from Fourteenth Street to City Hall
• Whyos: pre-1890s Five Points underworld gang
• Plug Uglies: pre-1890s Five Points underworld gang
• Dead Rabbits: pre-1890s Five Points underworld gang
• Kermit Roosevelt: TR's second son, 6 years old, violent
• Ethel Roosevelt: TR's younger daughter

Quotes edit see section history

• “We're all still running, according to Kreizler - in our private moments we Americans are running just as fast and fearfully as we were then, running away from the darkness we know to lie behind so many apparently tranquil doors, away from the nightmares that continue to be injected into children's skulls by people whom Nature tells them they should love and trust, running ever faster and in even greater numbers toward those potions, powders, preists, and philosophies that promise to obliterate such fears and nightmares, and ask in return only slavish devotion.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “". . . . Between Twenty-second and Twenty-third actually." (Sara)"But that's outside your assigned area." (Moore)"Yes. I sometimes don't say my prayers at night, either." She sighed once. (Sara)”

• “"Take part in the investigation?" I said, dumbfounded. "Roosevelt, have you lost your Dutch mind? An alienist? A psychologist? You've already made an enemy of every senior officer on the force, and half the Board of Commissioners, to boot. They're taking odds in half the gambling hells in town that you'll be fired by Independence Day! If word gets out that you've brought someone like Kreizler in--why, you'd be better off hiring an African witch doctor!"”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “Action, plans, a campaign--it almost wasn't fair to ask Theodore to make a sensible decision when faced with that kind of emotional enticement.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “Rarely have I felt so strongly the truth of Kreizler's belief that the answers one gives to life's crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior. Was Theodore--whose credo of active response to all challenges had guided him through physical sickness in youth and political and personal trials in adulthood--truly free to refuse Kreizler's offer? And if he accepted it, was I then free to say no to these two friends, with whom I had lived through many escapades and who were now telling me that my extracurricular activities and knowledge--so often dismissed as useless by almost everyone I knew--would prove vital in catching a brutal killer?”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “Besides investigating nearly every officer and detective in the Police Department, Roosevelt had made a point of hiring unlikely new recruits, in an effort to break the hold that the clique headed by Thomas Byrnes and such precinct heads as "Clubber" Williams and "Big Bill" Devery had on the force. Theodore was especially fond of bringing in Jews, whom he considered exceptionally honest and brave, referring to them as "Maccabean warriors for justice".”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “One of the first ways in which we can know our quarry is to know his victims.”

  Dr. Laszlo Kreizler

• “To the old guard of New York society, the Metropolitan Opera was "that yellow brewery uptown". This terse dismissal was prompted, on the most obvious level, by the boxiness of the building's Early Renaissance architecture and the color of the bricks used in its construction; but the attitude behind the comment was sparked by the Metropolitan's upstart history. Occupying the block bounded by Broadway, Seventh Avenue, and Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets, the Metropolitan, which opened in 1883, had been paid for by seventy-five of New York's most famous (and infamous) nouveaux riches: men with names like Morgan, Gould, Whitney and Vanderbilt, none of whom were deemed by the old Knickerbocker clans to be socially acceptable enough to warrant selling them boxes at the venerable Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “...an evening at the "yellow brewery" was, by 1896, fast becoming a musical experience that no other house or company in the world could surpass.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “...we now had the beginnings of a pattern, something on which to build a general picture of what qualities inspired violence in our killer.”

  Dr. Laszlo Kreizler

• “Talking during a performance at the Metropolitan was not generally considered a barbarity--indeed, some of the city's most noteworthy personal and business affairs were conducted at such times--”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “It is often difficult, I find, for people today to grasp the notion that one family, working through several restaurants, could change the eating habits of an entire country. But such was the achievement of the Delmonicos in the United States of the last century. <...> by the time of the Civil War, travelers from all over the country who had eaten at Delmonico's and taken news of the experience home with them were demanding that the owners of restaurants everywhere give them not only pleasant surroundings, but food that was nutritious and expertly prepared.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “Excuse my asking, Doctor, but...is there actually a conclusion to this meal, or do we just work our way into breakfast?”

  Lucius Isaacson

• “I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I still don't know how to discuss certain things with a lady present. (Lucius)Then pretend one isn't. (Sara)”

  Lucius Isaacson, Sara Howard

• “"The word he uses is 'shit'," Sara said bluntly, and everyone in the room, including Kreizler, seemed to spring a few inches off the floor for a second or two. "Honestly, gentlemen," Sara commented with some disdain. "If I'd known you were all so modest I'd have stuck to secretarial work."”

  Sara Howard

• “"...as long as the case is thought to be unsolvable, no one can be blamed for not solving it. The great unwashed will be made to understand that these things happen. It's no one's fault. Boys engage in criminal conduct. Boys die. Who kills them? Why? Impossible to determine. And there's no need to. Instead, you fix the public's attention on the more basic lesson--Obey the law in the first place and none of the rest occurs.”

  former NYC head Police Inspector Thomas Byrnes

• “Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function; and as I squeezed and pushed through the vestibule, trying to coax movement out of grandes dames whose clothing and physical proportions were suitable only to stationary pursuits, I occasionally ran into people I'd known during my childhood, friends of my parents who now turned away quickly when they caught my eye, or simply bowed in a minimal way that declared unmistakably, 'Please, spare me the embarrassment of actually having to speak with you'.”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “...as I was stumbling home from a meal at Delmonico's that would have slowed down a regiment of cavalry and their horses...”

  John Schuyler Moore

• “Thanks to Theodore and many of his political allies, we have been transformed into a great power, and New York is more than ever the crossroads of the world. The crime and corruption that are still the firm foundations of city life have taken on ever more businesslike trappings--Paul Kelly, for example, has gone on to become an important leader of organized labor.”

  John Schuyler Moore, in 1919

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• the answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

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• you cannot objectify the subjective, you cannot generalize the specific.

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• “We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.”

  Highlighted by 46 Kindle customers

• Every human being must find his own way to cope with such severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.

  Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers

• ‘Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.’”

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• running ever faster and in ever greater numbers toward those potions, powders, priests, and philosophies that promise to obliterate such fears and nightmares, and ask in return only slavish devotion.

  Highlighted by 35 Kindle customers

• “context”: the theory that every man’s actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man’s behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences.

  Highlighted by 35 Kindle customers

• “The degenerative processes in children have their chief encouragement in the equally defective home surroundings.”

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• Renouvier, who taught that a man could, by force of will, overcome all psychic (and many physical) ailments. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will!”

  Highlighted by 31 Kindle customers

• Stevie Taggert, “the Stevepipe,” as he was known. In his first eleven years Stevie had risen to become the bane of fifteen police precincts; but he’d then been reformed by, and was now a driver and general errand boy for, the eminent physician and alienist, my good friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• New York
• Washington Square
• Broadway
• Manhattan
• Ise
• Mulberry Street
• New Paltz
• Chicago
• Boston
• Lower East Side
• Bellevue
• Newton
• Massachusetts
• High Bridge Tower
• St. Elizabeth's Hospital
• Seventeenth Street
• Castle Garden
• Williamsburg Bridge
• Black
• Brooklyn Bridge
• Delmonico
• Tenderloin
• Harvard
• Santorellis

First Sentence edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• alienist: Prior to the 20th century, persons suffering from mental illness were considered "alienated", not only from society but from their true selves. Experts who studied mental pathologies were known as "alienists".
• the Arkansas toothpick: a knife with handle of deer antler, brass hilt, steel of the blade engraved with a picture of a stag in some brush. Originally designed by Jim Bowie or his brother in the early 1830s, manufactured by a Sheffield firm in England for export to Western US states. Can be used for hunting, but basically a fighting knife, for hand-to-hand combat.
• Bertillon system of identification and classification (anthropometry): Alphonse Bertillon, a misanthropic pedantic Frenchman, revolutionized the science of criminal identification during the 1880s. As a lowly clerk assigned the task of going through the files that the Paris police department kept on known criminals, Bertillon had discovered that if one took 14 measurements of any human body--not only height, but foot, hand, nose and ear size, and so on--the odds were over 286 milliion to one that any 2 people would share the same results. Despite enormous resistance from his superiors, Bertillon recorded body-part sizes of known criminals and categorized his results, then used the information to solve infamous cases that had stumped Paris detectives.
• Rogues' Gallery: Created by New York Police Department head of Division of Detectives Thomas Byrnes, a room full of photographs of most known criminals in the United States
• dactyloscopy: fingerprinting
• feeler: the member of a banco team that lures dupes to the site of the game
• mysophobia: the morbid fear of dirt and contamination
• hummingbird: an electrical device that administered painful shocks to prisoners, used in Sing Sing prison
• collar cap: a device made of iron as a grotesque punishment for unruly prisoners; a two-foot-high barred cage that surrounded the head and rested on the shoulders, and whose weight, equal to that of the prisoner's head, offered unending discomfort that drove many victims to the edge of madness
• the "Black Library": a cavernous room paneled with Santo Domingo mahogany that was nearly black, luxurious carpets, large fireplace, European paintings in ornate gold frames, tall bookshelves with rare leatherbound books; a room where some of the most important meetings in the history of New York (if not of the US) had taken place; in the residence of JP Morgan at 219 Madison Avenue
• rabbit: in gang parlance, a tough customer

Series & Lists edit see section history

Followed by The Angel of Darkness.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Caleb Carr (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Bram Stoker Award (Finalist, 1994: Novel)
• Anthony (1995: Best First Novel, winner)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3553.A76277 A44 1994
• Dewey: 818'.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Themes and scenes are really not appropriate for teens

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Authors, A-Z › ( C ) › Carr, Caleb
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Thrillers › Psychological & Suspense
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers › Mystery › Historical

Movie Connections edit see section history

• The Alienist (IMDb): 2006

More Books Like This edit see section history