'The Death Instinct': in 1920, a terrible act of terrorism on Wall Street

'The Death Instinct'

by Jeb Rubenfeld

Riverhead, 464 pp., $26.95

Jeb Rubenfeld's sprawling and ambitious literary mystery "The Death Instinct" is built around a real event: a bomb explosion on New York's Wall Street in 1920. The blast left 38 dead and 143 seriously hurt.

Who was responsible: Italian anarchists, as many at the time believed, or someone else? In real life, the crime was never solved; in Rubenfeld's vivid imagining, a solution is found — but not before the terrible deed serves as the backbone of his absorbing story.

The book is not Rubenfeld's first foray into the territory between fiction and historical truth. In 2006's "The Interpretation of Murder," a novel of ideas disguised as a murder mystery, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung played major roles. So did Stratham Younger, a (fictional) young doctor and student of Freud who is present front and center in this book.

Younger and his friend, NYPD Captain Jimmy Littlemore, witness the Wall Street explosion and are quickly caught up in the investigation. The two make a classic pair: Younger is ascetic and intellectual while Littlemore is unadulterated salt of the earth.

Also present is Younger's paramour: Collette Rousseau, a French radiologist and a protégée of Marie Curie. She's entangled in her own curious case: Something is sickening and killing young women in a watch factory, and it appears to have something to do with the radioactive material they work with.

Meanwhile, the bombing investigation kicks the plot into the realm of government and financial corruption. And then there's the sinister foreign figure who has stolen a vital piece of technology.

Not to mention the lengthy flashbacks to wartime, when Younger and Rousseau met under terrifying battle conditions. Throw in cameos by the likes of Freud, Curie, and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the newly minted Bureau of Investigation, and the book's major fault becomes visible.

The author is a law professor and an expert on Freud, and he clearly knows what he's talking about. But he wants to share his enthusiasm and his knowledge — plus he wants to write a novel of the mind, plus he wants to make it a ripping tale.

The result is too much of a good thing. Rubenfeld is generally good at keeping his plots and hefty themes aloft, but there are large patches of undigested historical research that feel uncomfortably like graduate-school lectures. (On the other hand, the author wisely doesn't belabor the clear parallels between the 1920 bombing and the events of 9/11.)

Shortcomings aside, "The Death Instinct" is never less than intelligent, absorbing and provocative. And, amid all the historical/fictional mash-ups, there are some nice flashes of humor, as when one of the book's minor characters remarks, "(P)erhaps all of this will make good crime fiction someday."

Adam Woog's column on crime fiction runs the second Sunday of each month in The Seattle Times.