Michael Gregorio: Critique of Criminal Reason. A Mystery. NY: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2006. 400 pp.
A series of gruesome murders has alarmed the citizens of Königsberg. Some see the crimes in the context of the looming shadow of Napoleon’s invasion. Others believe the murderer must be the Devil himself. The aged philosopher Immanuel Kant rejects both these views. Somewhat surprisingly, though, he does not attempt to solve crimes using pure reason, as one might expect. Instead, Kant effectively invokes the King’s name to summon investigative magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis from a remote village to the provincial capital and take charge of the case. (Incidentally, this name will prove well-chosen, as he is later said to speak “stiffly” and at another point says, “I stiffened.”)
It should not give too much away to say that attentive readers will be able to figure out whodunit half way through the book (Chapter 16), though the murderer’s accomplice is revealed only in Chapter 26 and the motive remains inscrutable until the final pages. Readers who do not wish to learn the murderer’s identity should skip the next paragraph.
In these pages, Immanuel Kant is portrayed as a highly intelligent thinker who, frustrated at the limits of reason at the end of his long life, yields to temptation. Driven by an uncontrollable urge to know and experience the irrational, he has instigated some of the murders, and eventually commits one himself. It would seem illogical for him to bring Stiffeniis into the case, unless the professor wants to be caught because he is alarmed at his own hidden, dark side. He proudly shows the investigator his grotesque Wunderkammer filled with pickled heads of the victims. It is as though Kant has been fused with the ghoulish character of the Count of Death from Hippelʼs novel, Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie (17787-1781), who also has a gallery in which he exhibits the heads of the deceased. Kant’s ultimate aim, apparently, is to publicize the horrific discoveries he has made about human nature in a posthumous opus, The Critique of Criminal Reason, the manuscript of which he bequeaths to Stiffeniis, who reads only the opening pages before destroying it. Thus, when we read The Critique of Criminal Reason by Michael Gregorio, we are reading a novel about a lost philosophical tome by Immanuel Kant with the same title.
Among the highlights are passages showing how the professor teaches the dogged investigator a new approach to crime-solving. The key is to attempt to understand the criminal’s state of mind. To this end, evidence at the scene should be left untouched so that it can be examined by dispassionate experts, then undergo scientific examination in the laboratory. Eye-witness testimony must be treated with skepticism, since all too often people see what they are predisposed to believe. Instead of threats and torture, an investigator should use reason to sift the evidence and arrive at conclusions. As Stiffeniis says, “He [Kant] had placed the materials in my hands and invited me to prove that I was the first of a new breed of investigative magistrates, that I was capable of employing a totally revolutionary technique involving methods that had never been used before in the fight against the worst of all crimes.”
While the alleged novelty of all this is a nice conceit, the claim that such an approach is “totally revolutionary” is somewhat a-historical. The use of torture, for instance, had already been banned a half century earlier by Frederick the Great.
While most of the characters – and all the victims – are fictional, the novel is populated with some authentic figures: Kant’s former students Johann Friedrich Vigilantius (1757-1823) and Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann (1767-1843), his servant Lampe, the next-generation philosopher Fichte, and mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), who famously proved that, no matter what route one took, it would be impossible – wherever one started – to cross all seven bridges of Königsberg without going over one of them twice; the novel errs in putting the number of bridges at nine.
This detail is minor, but one of the things the book has been praised for its alleged accuracy. If a novel seeks to enhance its plausibility by incorporating verifiable historical data, it loses credibility when it treats those data carelessly, even if they are not otherwise important. For a would-be historical mystery, this novel contains numerous errors, though sometimes it is difficult to determine which are inadvertent and which deliberate. Gregorio acknowledges drawing on Manfred Kuehn’s excellent biography for details of Kant’s life. Nonetheless, the Magistergasse, where Kant lived, is consistently called Magisterstrasse. Perhaps the author thought readers would not recognize “Gasse” as the correct spelling of the address. Kant never wrote a work with the title Foundations of the Metaphysics of Behaviour. He did write Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten). Conceivably this misstatement is deliberate.
In the novel, Kant casually addresses the investigator by his first name, Hanno. Such familiarity would have been highly unlikely. Kant used the informal “Du” with only a very few friends from his youth. He would not have been on such an intimate footing with someone he just met near the end of his life, and certainly not without first asking formal permission to do so.
The dust jacket, with its portrait of Kant in profile and its decorative blood drops, features a contemporary illustration of the wrong city – Berlin, not Königsberg.
According to the text of a popular song of the time: “the snow will sate my thirst.” Should be: will slake my thirst.
Frederick the Great was not the one who collected tall soldiers. That was his father, Frederick William I. Upon inheriting the throne, the son disbanded the unit as being militarily useless. Such errors – and there are more – do not inspire confidence in the authorʼs knowledge of the time and place.
All in all, this debut novel was successful enough to launch three sequels: Days of Atonement, Unholy Awakening and A Visible Darkness. The authors have also revealed that the name “Michael Gregorio” is a pseudonym made up of the husband’s first and his wife’s last names, Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. He teaches English, she philosophy, and they live in Spoleto, Italy.
PS The idea of decorating a room with paintings of the heads of the dying and deceased was featured in the third volume of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippelʼs novel, Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie from 1781. Though that novel also features a character based on Kant, he is not the owner of this macabre collection; it belongs rather to a character called the Count of Death (Sterbegraf).
c) Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 