Site Updates - Caleb Carr & The Alienist Books

New Integrated Forums

Posted on October 30, 20132 Comments

The 17th Street community forums have now been fully integrated with the rest of the website. I hope this makes the forums and website easier to navigate, and encourages discussion among interested visitors to the website. Also note that you can now sign in to the forum through your Twitter account to make joining the forum even easier!

If you haven’t previously visited the forums, please feel free to have a look around now. There are a variety of pre-existing topics up for discussion including which historical figures you would most like to see included in a new Alienist book, the development of the relationship between Laszlo and Sara throughout the novels, and who would make the best narrator for a new Alienist book. The full transcript from the chat with Caleb Carr conducted by The New York Times can also be found at the forums, as well as discussion on Caleb Carr’s non-Alienist works.

Things might be a little quiet over on the forums now, but the more people who get involved and talk, the better this area of the site can be for everyone. I hope to see you there soon!

New Character Profiles

Posted on October 25, 2013No Comments

As the most frequently visited section of 17th Street is the full character list, I have decided to slowly work on expanding it from a simple list of character names to include short profiles for each of the characters. Four of the main character profiles are now complete: Sara Howard, Lucius Isaacson, Marcus Isaacson, and Cyrus Montrose. Once the remaining main character profiles have been written, I will begin work on the supporting characters. In the meantime, a copy of Lucius’ profile can be viewed below while the remainder of the completed profiles can be viewed on the main characters page of the full character list.

Isaacson, Detective Sergeant Lucius

Appears in The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness

Detective Sergeant Lucius Isaacson is the younger brother of Detective Sergeant Marcus Isaacson and provides forensic medicine expertise to the investigative team. Lucius and Marcus were among the new police recruits hired by Theodore Roosevelt in his attempt to rid the police force of corruption, and were handpicked by Roosevelt to join the investigation in The Alienist due to their lack of loyalty to any of the force’s corrupt ‘old guard’ as well as their progressive methods in the newly established forensic sciences. We know little of Lucius’ background prior to joining the police force except that his parents were Jewish immigrants, he has one younger sister, and he went to medical school before joining his brother in working at the Pinkerton Detective Agency for a brief time. As with Marcus, he is a bachelor and the brothers still live at home with their mother for the duration of the novels.

Both of the Isaacson brothers are hyper-analytical and were drawn to detective work after reading Wilkie Collins’ novels as boys. Of the two brothers, Lucius is more prone to anxiety and can be easily flustered, but he also has a tendency to “grandstand” which is frequently the source of many bickering arguments between the brothers throughout the novels. Even so, the younger Isaacson’s competence is unquestionable and his skills in forensic medicine are an invaluable asset to the team. It is Lucius, for example, who discovers that the coroner’s report on a three year old cold case related to the murders in The Alienist was incorrect in concluding that the victims died of cut throats as he finds damage to the laryngeal structures on the corpses that indicates strangulation instead. In the same cold case, he also observes knife marks in the eye sockets that were overlooked by the coroner, thereby providing the team with crucial evidence that the killer used a particular type of hunting knife to remove the eyes of his victims.

Although Lucius continues to make these kinds of important discoveries throughout The Alienist which are then translated into a psychological profile of the killer by Dr. Kreizler, his role in The Angel of Darkness is slightly smaller as there are fewer tasks specific to his skills that are required of him. However, he and Marcus conduct the initial examination of Señora Linares’ injuries following her attack in Central Park, thereby providing the team with clues such as the approximate height of her attacker and the type of weapon employed, and it is Lucius who also has the idea for Kat Devlin to help the team by stealing one of Libby Hatch’s jackets for fingerprint and hair fiber analysis. Later in the novel, Lucius also helps Marcus conduct the ballistics testing and fingerprint analysis on the gun and bullets used to murder the Hatch children while the team stay in Ballston Spa, and he takes responsibility for presenting the ballistics evidence in court later in the novel.

Small Housekeeping Update

Posted on October 11, 2013No Comments

Due to my offline commitments, this is only a small housekeeping update. First, I have reorganised the Alienist location pages to correspond to the organisation I employed for the new maps. There are now only two location pages: one for New York City locations and one for locations outside New York City. Each listed location includes an address, a link back to the appropriate map it can be found in, and an indicator for which book it was featured in. Some of the previously listed locations have been removed temporarily as I will be rewriting them within the coming weeks. In addition, the plot timelines for both The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness have been updated to include part and chapter references to aid those who may be using the timelines for educational and book club purposes. Finally, the Caleb Carr press page has been updated to include a couple of previous interviews I had previously missed.

Thank you for your patience with the infrequent updates recently. I hope to get back to regular weekly updates soon.

Feedback Trends

Posted on September 7, 2013No Comments

Many thanks to those who provided feedback a fortnight ago about the kinds of topics you would most like to see discussed at 17th Street in the future. As I’m currently too swamped with work to research/write about anything specific to the books this week, I thought that I would take the opportunity to share some of the trends from the feedback survey instead.

Every survey respondent indicated that they had read both The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, which is probably not too surprising given the primary focus of this website. However, I was pleased to see that most respondents indicated that they had also read at least one other book of Mr. Carr’s, with The Italian Secretary and Killing Time the most common of his non-Alienist books to have been read.

Consistent with the preceding trend, the overwhelming majority of respondents indicated that they would prefer to read about topics on the blog related to the historical aspects of the Alienist books, with subject matter related to the literary aspects of the Alienist books the second most popular choice. There was also reasonable interest expressed in topics related to the historical aspects of Mr. Carr’s other novels, although there appears to be less interest in the literary aspects of these other novels or general topics related to Mr. Carr’s non-fiction work.

Perhaps the most interesting trend that I observed lay with the types of history topics respondents were most interested in reading about for the Alienist books. Social history related to the Alienist books was the most popular topic by a relatively narrow margin, with a fairly even spread of interest between New York history and true crime as the second most popular topics, and the history of psychology and the history of forensic science as the third most popular topics. Most respondents ticked multiple boxes for this question, which is why there is a fairly even spread among the second and third most popular topics.

Regarding which of Mr. Carr’s non-Alienist books respondents were most interested in reading about, The Legend of Broken was by far the most popular choice, with The Italian Secretary and Killing Time coming equal second. I can only suppose that even though respondents haven’t necessarily read The Legend of Broken, there is considerable curiosity among Mr. Carr’s readership about the new book, so I will do what I can to cover topics that might be helpful in addressing the types of questions Mr. Carr’s readers might have about Broken.

I also received some very creative and interesting new content suggestions and ideas about the 20th anniversary coming up next March, many of which I couldn’t possibly have come up with on my own. I won’t review these now but rest assured that your ideas have been heard and I will be doing my best to implement the most feasible of the suggestions over the coming months.