Caleb Carr’s The Angel of Darkness is an unusual mystery in that they give away the murder fairly early in the book. The real mystery is how they’re going to catch her because the murderer here is one of the most devious creatures I’ve come across in fiction.
It starts with a kidnapping. A mother is playing with her daughter outside of a museum when she is bashed on the head. When she comes to, her daughter is gone. From there, the team from Caleb Carr’s previous mystery, The Alienist, springs into action. Spearheaded by one of the few female detectives in 1890s New York, the team includes a journalist, a former child criminal, a manservant, and a preeminent psychologist try to chase down the kidnapper.
What they find is a woman who is ruled by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, Libbie Hatch wants to be a good mother, to live up to everyone’s expectation of what a woman should be. But on the other hand, she’s just no good at it. In her heart of hearts, she doesn’t want to be a wife and mother. She resents children. They’re a constant disappointment to her, too needy, to ungrateful. When they fail to thrive, it’s not her fault; they’re letting her down. There’s not one ounce of nurturing in her–but she keeps trying anyway. What makes her such a slippery character is the fact that she seems to be able to charm the right people. A perfect example of this: at one point, Libbie worked at a lying-in hospital. Several children died under her care. The nurses suspected and disliked her, but the doctors thought she was a hero for trying to save those poor babies. Our protagonists know she has the kidnapped child, but they just can’t find concrete proof to convince anyone else. The police, and many other people, just can’t accept the fact that a woman who wasn’t clearly insane might murder children.
By the mid-point of the novel, the protagonists have managed to uncover Libbie’s murderous past and taken her to trial. Things look promising until Libbie manages to wrangle a young Clarence Darrow as a lawyer. This fictional version of Darrow starts to throw around the word natural. Mothers naturally love their children. They naturally would not murder those children. Infanticide is unnatural. And because Libbie appears sane, she can’t have killed any child.
All this brings up what, for me, is the most interesting thing about this book: the conflict between a person’s inclinations and societal pressure. I’ve seen this a lot with a lot of the young women who live in this particular part of the American West. There’s an awful lot of pressure for young women of a particular religion to marry young and start reproducing. A high school friend of mine married and divorced and remarried within just a few years because of this pressure. Libbie was pressured all her young life to follow the model everyone expected of women in the nineteenth century: to marry and start reproducing. Any other desires were unnatural. You can imagine how wanting one kind of life and being pressured into another, for which one is totally unsuited, could really warp a person.
This is the reason I like Caleb Carr’s duology are the psychological portraits. Even though the forensic psychology is more than a little anachronistic (but in the service of fiction, so I can forgive it), it’s fascinating. They’re profound and utterly convincing. More than that, they highlight tension in the society of the time.
Another reason I like this duology is because Carr is an expert at pacing. The plot rolls along when it needs to, but when you get to the climax you better cancel your plans for later because you’re not going anywhere until the book is done. I really, really wish that Carr has more plans for this series. It doesn’t look likely because Angel of Darkness came out in 1998. And there is a pretty efficient wrap up at the end that makes me think that there won’t be any more. Pity.