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.

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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.

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Interview from the CBS Archives

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Following Caleb Carr’s passing last week, CBS released an interview from their archives that originally aired on CBS Sunday Morning after the release of The Italian Secretary in 2005. Providing a rare glimpse into his life on Misery Mountain, in the interview Caleb discusses a diverse array of topics ranging from taking on the challenge of a Sherlock tale commissioned by the Doyle estate, the building of his house, his childhood, his passion for military history, and even his work on the opera Merlin.

At this sad time, I hope it will comfort Caleb’s loyal readership to see this footage where he is happy and in his element.

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.