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.
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.
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.
Several new interviews and reviews have been released in the lead up to the publication of Caleb Carr’s new memoir My Beloved Monster on April 16. Perhaps most revealing was a pre-recorded interview Caleb gave to CBS Saturday Morning, offering in-depth insight into the writing of the memoir and his special relationship with Masha, along with sobering news about the current state of his health. The segment can be viewed below:
In addition, he gave an interview with Scott Simon on NPR about the memoir that you can read the transcript of or listen to here.
The book has also garnered several wonderful reviews. Chris Bohjalian in the Washington Post described the book as a “warm, wrenching love story,” concluding:
Like all good memoirs — and this is an excellent one — “My Beloved Monster” is not always for the faint of heart. Because life is not for the faint of heart. But it is worth the emotional investment, and the tissues you will need by the end, to spend time with a writer and cat duo as extraordinary as Masha and Carr.
Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times similarly framed the memoir as “loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment,” while a Booklist review called it “a love story of the best, most ethereal kind.” Publisher’s Weekly also praised the book as “lively and moving….even readers without their own furry friend will be moved.”
Caleb said in the CBS interview that for the latter years of Masha’s life, he would look at her and say, “Some day, I’m going to make you famous.” With My Beloved Monster currently trending #1 in memoirs and author biographies on Amazon, it certainly looks as though his promise is coming true. I’m sure many of Caleb’s loyal readers will be looking forward to meeting Masha and learning about the bond she and Caleb shared when the memoir is released on Tuesday — and, of course, wish him peace and strength as he fights his current health battle.
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.
