MURDER MOST FEMALE

By John Skow

Caleb Carr's gaslit narrative style has gained a touch of weight since his agreeable turn-of-the-century detective novel The Alienist (1994), but perhaps no more than success justifies. The reader is inclined to nod indulgently--at the new novel's 629 pages, at the rustle of the writer's smoking jacket and at the swirl of the great man's brandy. That's the illusion--author as Basil Rathbone--that Carr, 42, persuades us to believe in.

He works hard at making The Angel of Darkness (Random House; $25.95) as impudent and beguiling as The Alienist and for the most part succeeds. The old gang is back: Miss Howard, the derringer-packing feminist detective; Moore, the boozy New York Times reporter; Cyrus, the piano-playing coachman; the redoubtable Isaacson detective brothers; and Stevie, the reformed street urchin, who later, as a grown man, narrates the adventure. (His urchin usage is not unfailingly convincing, as in "I remember reading in The Principles of Psychology, that doorstop of a book--what Professor William James had written...and which I'd fought my way through...") Teddy Roosevelt, as before, is a bully minor character, though here he is Assistant Secretary of the Navy, not New York City police commissioner. And in a brilliant bit of historical casting, Clarence Darrow, a rising courtroom wizard from Chicago, turns up to confound the good guys and defend the villain at a tense upstate New York murder trial.

Darrow's client is a serial-killing woman who has murdered several adults and a large number of children, including at least three of her own. And here is where the plot seems a bit askew. As in real life, Darrow is a passionate death-penalty opponent. If he loses, his thoroughly guilty client goes to the electric chair. Just deserts aside, the novel has clip-clopped along too jocularly for too many chapters for this to be an acceptable outcome. Well, can the child killer go free? Perish forbid. Therefore...

The novel psychological theories of the great (and imaginary) psychiatrist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler seem a bit further from the center of things here than they did in The Alienist. True, he affronts received opinion by postulating that a woman, because of her treatment in childhood, may be quite capable of murdering her own children and those of others. He helps trap the woman he has described. But for the trial to go forward he must declare her sane, a judgment that would have seemed as mushy at the beginning of the Freudian era as it does now. For a long stretch of chapters, the trial seizes the story, and Kreizler, who is not a lawyer, can't take it back. A good courtroom drama, always welcome but not uncommon, floods the author's rare and fascinating tunneling into the beginnings of psychiatry.

--By John Skow