Alienist Books News

Celebrating 30 Years of The Alienist – Part Three

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View Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of The Alienist 30th anniversary series.

To honor Caleb Carr’s birthday today, I am pleased to release the third post in our series commemorating the 30th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication. Having discussed the novel’s origins in Part One and its critical reception in Part Two, in this installment we return to Caleb’s first love — the screen — and a major source of buzz in the lead up to The Alienist’s publication: the promise of a movie adaptation. “You won’t find many writers who love movies as much as I do,” Caleb explained in an interview from 1997. “Movies formed much of the imagery that I use in my books.”

Thanks to a generous visitor to the website, in today’s post we glimpse a rare leather-bound copy of one of the first scripts developed for the book and learn about the challenges it faced making the leap to the screen.

Taking the story from page to screen

The Alienist script

As described in Part One, The Alienist was the talk of Hollywood even before its publication. Soon after the manuscript was turned in to Random House in 1993, interest in purchasing the film rights was high, with names like Mike Nichols and Kathleen Kennedy looking at the project; however, it was Scott Rudin who made the winning bid of $500,000. Unfortunately, the excitement that followed was short lived. Caleb revealed in a 2013 New York Times book club chat that he ultimately came to wish he hadn’t listened to his agents’ advice on proceeding with the sale:

“What originally happened was that Mike Nichols had wanted to buy the book; but he was outbid, for reasons of professional competitiveness, by producer Scott Rudin, and how I wish I hadn’t listened to my agents. Rudin promised me I could write the script, then immediately reneged on that pledge and told me that there was “no movie in the Alienist.” He spent many years and millions of dollars on writers and directors who turned in one lousy script after another, which I was fortunate enough to be able to stop, incurring Rudin’s well-known wrath. He has now repeatedly said that there will never be a film of the movie, and although that decision is the studio’s, not his, he spent so much money on development that no one can afford the turnaround.”

The saga of the scripts

The script problems Caleb referenced go back to the very beginning. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times from 1995, the first of the scripts to be rejected was written by Tony-award winning playwright David Henry Hwang, who turned in a draft that “diverged too radically from the novel, focusing on a minor female character.” A second script, this time written by Steven Katz (Shadow of the Vampire, The Knick, and uncredited for work on Interview with the Vampire), was “considered too slavish to the original source material.” Even so, it appears this was a version Rudin had hopes for.

To entice studio executives into paying attention to the project, it was revealed in July of 1995 that Rudin made the unusual decision to arrange for copies of the script to bound in a special leather volume. Illustrated with period photographs and artwork of late 19th century New York, these copies were truly beautiful, as you can see below.

We were lucky to have photographs of one of these volumes provided by a kind visitor to the site, Steve Rogers, who described it in the following terms: “The pictures do not do justice to the book in your hands. The quality is excellent, the translucent gilded paper over title pages, soft leather, the ties, binding, the period pictures to give a feel of what life was like during that era, so much more.”

Beautiful binding or not, this script was also destined to go the way of Hwang’s, though the reasons why are not clear other than the reference to it being “too slavish” to the book. At the time, Variety reported that “[a] handful of Paramount execs received the delicate volume” and it “caught the attention of several directors including Peter Weir (The Last Wave) and Philip Kaufman (Rising Sun)”. In the end, the latter did come on board, with the Los Angeles Times explaining that, after moving on from Katz’s script, Rudin hired Kaufman to attempt a third version, but it did not get off the ground either.

By the time the novel’s sequel, The Angel of Darkness, was published in 1997, Caleb revealed to the Los Angeles Times that Rudin “has had three writers and at least six drafts — none of them done by me. He never fulfilled his pledge to bring me in.” In addition, significant budgetary concerns held the project up. Variety reported that Curtis Hanson, originally attached to direct, departed over budget disagreements, while Paramount objected to the proposed $50 million budget when Kaufman joined. To explain his position on these various points of contention, Caleb told Salon in 1997:

“I don’t know that they really understood what book they were buying in a certain sense. It’s a period piece, yes, but that’s not hard. Period pieces are coming out all the time now. It doesn’t have to be that expensive, either. But it’s an ensemble piece that doesn’t happen to involve a love story. And that’s where they’re really tripping. They’re trying to make it a star vehicle with a love story. Well, that’s not the book they bought.”

Ultimately, the project stalled in pre-production and was shelved until 2014 when the president of Paramount Television made a surprise announcement that the newly relaunched television division of Paramount had several projects in development including “a drama series inspired by Caleb Carr’s best-selling novel, The Alienist, with Anonymous Content (True Detective) executive producing.” This, of course, would go on to become the TV series starring Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans — a series that has a long and complex production history of its own.

I hope you enjoyed this rare glimpse of the special volume of Katz’s script. In the next installment of this 30th anniversary series will return to the books themselves and dive into the publication history of The Alienist’s sequel. You can continue reading here. And if any visitors have further information about the script or the early history of attempts to take The Alienist to the screen that you would like to share, please do feel free to get in touch.

Celebrating 30 Years of The Alienist – Part Two

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View Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of The Alienist 30th anniversary series.

Today we continue our celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication in 1994. This is the second in a series of posts to be released throughout 2024 honoring the novel’s enduring impact, and we do so with an even greater sense of purpose given the immensely sad news of the loss of its much treasured author last month. It was Caleb Carr’s vision that brought us the world of Dr. Kreizler and his team, and in this series we hope to pay tribute to his legacy. In this post, we turn to the novel’s publication, discussing its critical reception and early editions, before going on to examine some later special editions that are worth any serious collector’s attention.

A bestseller is born

The Alienist

Following a huge amount of buzz in the lead up to its publication (see Part One), The Alienist made its debut in March of 1994. Although its publisher, Random House, released the hardback first edition most readers would come to recognize, the novel’s true first edition was the Franklin Library Signed First Edition.

An affiliate of the Franklin Mint, the Franklin Library was operational from 1973 to 2000 and had several series of fine leather-bound (and some imitation and quarter-bound) books produced under their name. These included, among others, their 100 Greatest Books of All Time series, Signed First Edition series, and Signed Limited Edition series. Of note, the works they selected for their Signed First Edition series were those they believed had the potential to become the classics of the future—so the fact that they chose a debut novelist for a place on the list was highly unusual (for, although Caleb had one novel, Casing the Promised Land, to his name, it was little known and The Alienist was treated by most in the industry as a debut).

Nonetheless, the anticipation surrounding the novel (see Part One) resulted in the work receiving the honor of being included in the series, and Caleb also wrote a foreword that was exclusive to this edition. Like all other Franklin Library Signed First Editions, this edition was fully leather-bound with 22 karat gold ornamentation. It also included a custom illustration and was printed on acid-free paper with gilt edging. Although the precise number of copies was not made public by Franklin Library, the sequel which was also published by Franklin Library (see Part Four) was limited to 1,500 copies worldwide. As you can see below, it is a truly beautiful edition.

Of course, for most readers, it was Random House’s first edition they would see on bookstore shelves. Featuring a sepia-toned photograph called The Street by Alfred Stieglitz from Camera Work (July 1903), Caleb revealed in an interview with Publishers Weekly in 1997 that he helped to design the now iconic cover. For collectors, the first printing of the first edition can be identified by the printer’s key “9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2” and “First Edition” on the copyright page.

When the 493-page novel was released, it met all the expectations that its pre-publication buzz had anticipated. In an interview from 2005, Caleb said, “It was just supposed to be a little cottage industry that would give me a stipend to live off while I was doing the work that I had always done and which I was trained to do.” Instead, The Alienist made the hardcover bestseller lists of Publishers Weekly and The New York Times in the month following its release, going on to spend the next six months hovering between number nos. 4 and 7 on the latter’s list.

Interestingly, in the Publishers Weekly interview from 1997, Caleb stated that the book “did not get heavy promo until it started to sell. Random House will sometimes deny that, but the fact is the book started to sell for two reasons: the cover and word of mouth.” Reviewers, meanwhile, praised the novel as “breathtaking,” “remarkable,” and “absorbing,” with The New York Times acknowledging that he had “lovingly evoked not only a physical sense of old New York but the spirit of the time as well.” Perhaps the review that put it best was Patricia Ann Jones’ in Tulsa World, who wrote that The Alienist “breaks new ground on several fronts. As a historical novel it paints an unrivaled picture of New York. As a thriller it sets a new pace. But as a psychological study it stands completely on its own. The writing is quite simply, superb.”

The foreign rights are sold

Of course, the novel went on to be a major success abroad as well. Although I haven’t been able to find a publicly available source for what the UK rights sold to Little, Brown and Company for, the amounts are known for two other European countries. Specifically, the German rights sold for $105,000, while the Italian sold for $30,000. But it goes without saying that these are only a few of the numerous foreign editions that exist for the novel.

When published in the UK by Little, Brown and Company, the first edition received a new cover design. As seen in the following images (kindly provided by Steve Rogers), the new UK design featured a black and white image of Delmonico’s West 26th Street location sourced from The New York Historical Society, and a large author photograph on the back cover. The first row of photos below shows the UK uncorrected proof, while the second row of photos shows the first edition hardback.

The novel’s enduring appeal

In mid-1994, The Alienist’s success in hardback netted it a very healthy paperback rights sale at auction for $1,001,000 to Bantam, and several different paperback editions have been released in the years since, including mass market and trade paperbacks. Perhaps the most noteworthy, however, was a Random House trade paperback released in 2006.

Dedicated to “Those Readers Who Made It Possible” and the memory of Dr. David Abrahamsen — a forensic psychiatrist whose influence was crucial in the development of the novel — this edition featured an updated version of the classic cover along with a special afterword in which Caleb shared the story of The Alienist’s inspiration and creation. It even includes a false visual of Dr. Kreizler (really, composer Edvard Grieg) sitting with Theodore Roosevelt, a “photograph” that was created by Caleb with the intent to fool his agent and editor into believing the story was a true one! The 2006 edition is a truly special one. (Unfortunately, my original 2006 edition was damaged when lent to a friend, so these images are of a later trade paperback that is identical in all respects except for the addition of the TV series banner on the cover.)

Of course, The Alienist’s enduring appeal over the past thirty years has resulted in other special editions being released. Easton Press, who specialize in fine leather-bound editions, released a stunning special edition in 2013 as part of their Signed Modern Classics collection. Like the original Franklin Library edition, this special edition also featured the new afterword written for the 2006 trade paperback and was accented in 22 karat gold ornamentation.

Finally, the new afterword was also included in a special limited edition hardback released in collaboration with Book of the Month in 2017. Presumably intended to spark renewed interest in the novel following the announcement of the continuation of the series (that unfortunately did not come to pass) along with the TV series release in 2018, this lovely edition features the same updated classic cover design that was used on the 2006 trade paperback. Thanks once again to Steve Rogers for sharing these photos.

And that is all for the first and special editions of The Alienist. In the next installment of this celebration series, we share the story of the novel’s journey to the screen and will feature a very special copy of a rare early script that was used to drum up interest in the movie back when it was first shopped in Hollywood. You can continue reading here.

Remembering Caleb Carr (1955-2024)

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It is with great sadness that 17th Street acknowledges the passing of Caleb Carr, who died on Thursday, May 23, at the age of 68. According to The New York Times, he died at his home in Cherry Plain, NY. He had been fighting a difficult battle with cancer.

Although best known for his Alienist novels, Caleb’s career was long and varied. Beginning with America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars in 1989 (co-written with friend and mentor, James Chace), Caleb wrote extensively about military history and national security. His most prominent non-fiction works included a biography of Frederick Townsend Ward, The Devil Soldier: The American Soldier of Fortune Who Became a God in China, and an examination of the history of terrorism, The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians. In addition, Caleb was the editor of Random House’s Modern Library War Series and was a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In the mid-2000s, he also spent a number of years teaching military history studies at Bard College as a Visiting Professor.

Outside of academia, Caleb spent a number of years working in the film industry and theatre whilst freelancing in the 1980s. His work in the film industry continued into the 1990s, and he was involved with several TV mini series and films as a presenter, executive producer, and writer. Most notably, he wrote the TV movies Bad Attitudes in 1991 and The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy in 1998, and was credited as a co-writer for Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Testifying to his versatility, Caleb started working as a librettist with friend and composer Ezequiel Viñao in the 1990s on Merlin, an opera based on the Arthurian legends, and he even tried his hand at politics: he ran as a Democrat for the Rensselaer County Legislature in 2005, but was unsuccessful.

Despite these varying areas of interest, it was through fiction that Caleb’s talents shone brightest. Although he described his first novel Casing the Promised Land as “roman à clef nonsense,” his subsequent works were enormously successful. In 1994, The Alienist spent six months on The New York Times bestseller list, won the 1995 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and was nominated for the 1995 Bram Stoker Best Novel Award. Its sequel, The Angel of Darkness, was similarly well-received when it was published in 1997 and outsold its predecessor. In 2000, Caleb made an unanticipated venture into sci-fi with a serial for Time magazine, Killing Time, which was later published in book form, before returning to his roots in historical fiction with The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, which the Doyle estate commissioned in 2005. After taking a break for several years, Caleb then returned to fiction in 2012 with his Dark Age saga, The Legend of Broken, and surprised fans four years later with Surrender, New York, a contemporary thriller set in upstate New York with strong ties to the Alienist novels.

In addition to Surrender, the mid-2010s heralded a second exciting announcement for Caleb’s loyal readership: Mulholland Books would be publishing the long-anticipated continuation of the Alienist series. The continuation was set to comprise two novels, but due to delays and significant illness, the plans were unfortunately not able to come to fruition. Instead, Caleb’s last book, My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, was released in April of 2024. A deeply personal work, the memoir is a love story documenting his life and shared bond with his feline companion, Masha.

As the owner of 17th Street, I did not want to leave this moment unmarked on a personal level. Although Caleb was a deeply private person, he was always supportive of 17th Street and I sincerely valued his generosity and kindness. While I am sure that his many loyal readers will indeed be sorry that he was unable to complete the Alienist series as planned, I know that in the last years of his life, he didn’t feel that he had more than one book left–and he wanted that book to be for Masha. I am only grateful that he lived to see the outpouring of support and praise My Beloved Monster received on its publication last month. I will miss his friendship deeply.

17th Street will remain active and I will be spending the second half of 2024 remembering Caleb’s works, including The Alienist which was published thirty years ago in 1994. I hope you will join me in continuing to show your support for an author who endured much, but whose works have made an enormous difference for the better in so many people’s lives.

Photo Credit: William von Hartz

Celebrating 30 Years of The Alienist – Part One

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View Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five of The Alienist 30th anniversary series.

For those who are finding the website through this post, please note that Caleb Carr passed away in May, 2024. See Remembering Caleb Carr (1955-2024) for 17th Street’s memorial to a beloved author.

“You can practically hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves echoing down old Broadway … You can taste the good food at Delmonico’s. You can smell the fear in the air.”

So began The New York Times’s review of The Alienist in 1994, and the words are no less true now than they were then. Published thirty years ago this month on March 15, 1994, Caleb Carr’s breakthrough thriller went on to garner significant public and critical acclaim, spending 24 weeks on the Times’s hardcover fiction bestseller list and earning its author an Anthony Award in 1995. It’s little wonder why. Through its seamless blend of meticulously researched historical detail, captivating team of investigators led by the enigmatic and brilliant Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, and thrilling chase for a killer, the novel captured the imaginations of so many readers that it has been studied in schools and is considered a modern classic of its genre.

For the 20th anniversary of the The Alienist’s publication in 2014, 17th Street featured an in-depth collection of posts exploring the novel’s themes and enduring appeal. This year, we will be commemorating Caleb and celebrating the work’s 30th anniversary by delving into the novel’s journey to publication with some wonderful insights into rare early editions, along with discussing the reception the novel received upon release and the legacy it has left on the genre today. Like the 20th anniversary series, this celebration will take place over a series of posts, and I hope it will provide something of interest to new and old fans alike.

To the beginning, then!

The journey to publication

In the afterword to the 2006 trade paperback edition of The Alienist, Caleb Carr wrote: “Like most wonderful and terrible things, The Alienist was never supposed to happen.”

Two years before the groundbreaking thriller was set to make its appearance and change the landscape of historical fiction, Caleb’s first major sole-authored work of military history, The Devil Soldier, had just been published by Random House, and its author was on the hunt for his next subject. But instead of a work of history, another idea had been brewing. “A lifelong interest in crime and the formation of the mind had led me to decide on a psychological thriller,” Caleb explained in the 2006 afterword, “but my grounding in nonfiction would not allow me to be anything but rigorous in my research and approach. This, I soon realized, could get tricky: How do you devise a story that includes the kind of hard science I’d nosed around in without making readers and audiences want to drive ice picks through their own eyes?”

The challenge went beyond the difficulties of incorporating complex philosophical ideas and early forensic science in a thriller, though. Given that Caleb was still in the process of building a profile as a serious historian, his agent, Suzanne Gluck at WME, and editor, Ann Godoff at Random House, were not of a mind to encourage Caleb’s move from nonfiction to fiction. Thus, once he settled on a subject — inspired, at least in part, by his experiences as a college student during the ‘Son of Sam’ killings in New York — Caleb needed a way to convince his publishing partners to support the switch. The solution, he decided, lay in selling the story as a work of nonfiction, not fiction. To pull off such a scheme required not only a believable premise, but also doctored paperwork, including a false visual: a photograph showing Dr. Laszlo Kreizler visiting Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, years after the events of The Alienist supposedly took place.

The process of creating the false image, and the a copy of the photograph itself, can be found in the 2006 afterword (which I highly recommend reading), but for our purposes here, what matters is the end result: it worked. Caleb’s agent, Suzanne Gluck, took the ruse well, and his editor, Ann Godoff — even then, a formidable force in publishing — was also won over. And so, after receiving an advance of $65,000 for the book, the process of writing began. In an interview with New York Magazine in 1994, it was explained:

For fourteen months, Carr lived The Alienist. He read dozens of books on serial killers and huddled with Dr. David Abrahamsen, a dean of forensic psychiatry. Friends would bump into Carr at odd hours, in odd parts of town, trying to track down addresses that had long disappeared. One ex-girlfriend recalls that during touch-football games, he’d talk brain dissection.

The specifics of the novel’s editorial process have not been discussed in interviews (at least to my knowledge), but the novel’s timeline from Spring, 1993 onward is known. At that time, Caleb turned in the 700-page manuscript, and soon afterward it began to circulate around Hollywood. By late June, the debut thriller had built such buzz that producer Scott Rudin had purchased the film rights for $500,000. This only caused interest in the still-unpublished novel to skyrocket.

By September of 1993, photocopied typescripts of the novel were ready to be distributed to sales representatives. A kind visitor to 17th Street, Steve Rogers, sent through photographs of an extremely rare copy of one of these typescripts that he was recently able to acquire. Bound in plain blue stock paper and tape with a note from Bridget Marmion, the Random House Director of Marketing, on the cover, this fascinating typescript includes an editorial fact sheet (revealing a first printing of 100,000 copies), a copy of The Hollywood Reporter‘s article on Scott Rudin’s purchase of the film rights, and the manuscript itself.

To a collector, this is like finding gold. Other than Caleb Carr’s original manuscript, editorial copies, and whatever copies were distributed to sell the movie rights, this is likely the earliest copy that exists. But Steve had several other rare editions that he was kind enough to share photographs of for the website.

In the lead up to the novel’s release, uncorrected proofs were distributed to reviewers, critics, and industry professionals for early evaluation and feedback to generate interest. The Alienist‘s uncorrected proof edition had a standard blue and white Random House paperback binding, with promotional material on the flyleaf.

Finally, advance reader copy (or ARC) editions were also distributed for The Alienist to build buzz and anticipation for its impending release, an example of which can be seen below. Although the binding is still plain (this time maroon), the same typeface and title design that would come to be used on the first hardback edition has now appeared, and you can see the novel transitioning to its final finished form. On the back cover, the novel’s finalised blurb appears.

The publication would soon follow in March of 1994, but the whirlwind wasn’t over yet!

The next installment of this 30th anniversary series contains the story of the novel’s release and photographs of first and special editions of the novel. You can continue reading here. And, of course, if any visitors have further details about the editions shown here they would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch.