Author merges psychoanalysis and murder in bygone Manhattan

The Interpretation of Murder
By Jed Rubenfeld
Holt, 367 pp., $26

It is beginning to look like Yale Law School could use its own in-house trade publisher, or at least an imprint specializing in erudite thrillers for the Grisham lover with literary tastes. "The Emperor of Ocean Park," by professor of law Stephen L. Carter ; "The Dante Club," by then Yale law student Matthew Pearl ; and now Jed Rubenfeld's "The Interpretation of Murder" confirm that, perhaps, there really is something in the water in New Haven. A professor of law at Yale and a first-time novelist, Rubenfeld attempts, although with only partial success, to parlay his undergraduate interest in Freud, his love of Shakespeare, and his history buff's fascination with the engineering marvels and technological changes of New York City circa 1909 into a "Law & Order: SVU "-brand murder mystery that wends its way through the penthouses and subterranean spaces of Mayor George B. McClellan 's early-20th-century Gotham.

Just as Freud and his trans-Atlantic travel companions Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung disembark from their steamship in Hoboken Harbor, en route to Clark University, where Freud was to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis, a murder scene is unfolding uptown. Miss Elizabeth Riverford has been strangled, her wrists bound and her body scored with lash marks, the victim of "murder and perhaps worse." The paths of psychoanalysis and murder do not converge, however, until a nearly identical crime comes to the attention of police the following evening. The young socialite Nora Acton survived this latest brutal assault, but is left unable to speak or to recall any of the details of the crime or its perpetrator. Freud is spirited away to the First Precinct station house by order of the mayor to examine Miss Acton and, hopefully, to aid her in recovering her memory. Analysis is in order, of course, so Freud asks his American protégé, the fictional Clark University psychologist Dr. Stratham Younger , to assume primary responsibility for the case with Freud as informal consultant. The novel's police investigation and analytical detective work, operating mostly in tandem, lead Detective Jimmy Littlemore and Dr. Younger to butt heads with a motley crew of American aristocrats, Chinese and Italian immigrants, a mayor , and a powerful East Side madam.

Rubenfeld is an expert legal scholar, whose attention to detail leads him to assemble the picture of a bygone Manhattan that, he proudly confesses, has been "painstakingly researched." He is especially keen to showcase his knowledge not only of old New York landmarks, high-society life, and perhaps frequently ignored trivia like the color of taxis in 1909, but also of Freud and his circle. In a somewhat stilted attempt to capture the souls of his historical characters, Rubenfeld liberally lifts dialogue directly from Freud's well-known papers and his correspondence.

The gesture to represent the authentic flavor of turn-of-the-century New York is an admirable one. But Rubenfeld's preoccupation with "getting it right" too frequently leaves his prose feeling flat and gives the novel the feeling of a college essay written by a clever student exceedingly eager to impress. It doesn't help matters, either, that Dr. Younger opines far too often on the subject of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (" 'Last night,' I said, 'I solved To be, or not to be' " ) or that Nora is, in part, a cardboard rip-off of Freud's Dora, the subject of one of Freud's better-known case histories. The addition of Nora/Dora in a thriller that depends so heavily upon the element of suspense is a peculiar one, in part because, as readers of Freud's case histories know well, the crucial elements of Dora's case were revealed in 1905, when Freud first published his "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria."

Rubenfeld clearly has great affection for his subject, but if a thriller lives or dies by its power to keep us at the edge of our seat, then he has cheated his readers of too many delectable surprises.