Misfits and Queers: Alienism, Detective Agency, and Neo-Victorian Investigation in The Alienist(s)

One of the subgenres in neo-Victorian writing that has had a great deal of interest and success is a revisioning of the detective novel. These texts combine the nineteenth-century narrative with police procedural and/or Sherlockian mysteries as fruitful means of neo-Victorian investigation of everything from the Woman Question to queer communities. This chapter looks at how, much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales from the earlier fin-de-siècle, Caleb Carr’s distinctive The Alienist (1994) and its sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997) and The Alienist limited adaptation (TNT 2018–2020), capture the abilities of and the need for misfits and queer outsiders to track down liminal outsiders who become victims or killers. Maier argues that, ultimately, interpretive meaning comes from all the scientific pieces of the investigation where the queering of the alienist (now profiler) and his team who see things “otherwise” than a normative Victorian community allows them the agency to read the situation in a queer, holistic manner to complete a comprehensive narrative of explanation for murder, giving closure to the question of why society needs to ostracise such killers.