THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS
HISTORIC FICTION: THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS/Caleb Carr -1997 – Ballentine
When I saw a familiar-looking cover sitting on the top of a trash can outside the Stand in New York, I examined it for dirt, bugs or other assorted unhealthy signs, saw it was relatively clean. The price was right. I saw that it was the sequel to Carr’s THE ALIENIST, which I read, liked but don’t remember. I could see from the sepia cover photo, this book was also set in the late 19th Century in New York. Great! I settled in to savor the book.
With the familiar but different setting of New York over a hundred years ago, I was intrigued by the plot line, involving the abduction of the baby daughter of a Spanish diplomat. I soon remembered the cast of sleuths that appeared in THE ALIENIST: Dr. Lazlo Kreizler, Sara Howard, the gun-toting feminist turned detective, the Isaccson brothers, two brilliant men dealing in medicine and forensics and attached to the New York Police Department, Cyrus, a black man turned from crime and living with the famous psychiatrist, Stevie Taggart, a fourteen-year-old former ruffian and John Moore, a well-healed newspaper man.
Sara, who has opened her own detective agency specializing the the problems of women, is approached to help her find her baby daughter. Mrs. Lineras stresses that she doesn’t want to involve the police. It is very sensitive and even her husband, a diplomat from Spain, is against involving anyone in the search for his daughter. The political climate is tenuous and this could prove to spark an international incident. The baby, Ana, was snatched right near the Metropolitan Museum of Art via a woman who pushed Mrs. Lineras and snatched the baby and disappeared. Later, the team came up with a bold new idea: Mrs. Linares had spotted the kidnapper and the child on the Third Avenue El as she stood on the platform. The idea was to find an artist to draw a sketch from Mrs. Linares’s rather detailed memory. The plot unfolded and Elspeth Hatch was identified as the kidnapper. The former nurse seemed to have a suspicious past. Babies in her care wound up dead. They followed clues that took her history back to Ballston Spa, New York. There was talk that she had a past that included a dead husband and two dead children. One daughter survived but couldn’t speak. They were dealing with a complex, mysterious, changeable female mass murderer.
Ultimately, I found this book rough going and quite contrived. It was very heavy handed in its political correctness, pushing hard an the reader with its use of ideas of feminism, racism, and anti-semitism.
Caleb Carr, who is a master of historical fiction, is meticulous in his detail of old New York and the Saratoga area of New York. Some of his involvement of real people is just plain silly. He brings in then Navy Secretary Teddy Roosevelt to enlist the help of sailors to apprehend the suspect, hidden and protected by a local gang near the Hudson.
Although I finished the book, my main objection was putting it in the words of an older Stevie Taggart. This storyteller, now old and sick because of his smoking addiction (again politically correct) tells this story in a voice and sentence structure that is, frankly, hard to read. Unschooled, but educated by his street smarts and exposure to the doctor’s world, consistently reveals the mystery, in the broken style of misused words and explanations of his use of big words prefaced by “what you might call…” I believe that Carr made a bad decision to make Stevie the narrator. This could have been an excellent book.
