With the year nearing its end, the time has come for the last post in our celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Alienist’s publication. To honor the novel and its author, we have so far discussed its origins and first/special editions (Parts One and Two), explored early attempts to adapt it to the screen (Part Three), and summarized the publication history of its sequel, The Angel of Darkness (Part Four). In order to complete our homage today, we now turn our attention to the novel’s many translations and consider its enduring legacy.
Translations
Perhaps one of the best markers of a novel’s success is how widely translated it has been, and The Alienist is no exception. Although our celebration so far has primarily focused on the novel’s reception in the United States, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to its status as a bestseller. As described in Part Two, The Alienist was a worldwide phenomenon upon its release. Since that time, millions of copies have been sold, and it has been translated into over two dozen languages.
While it is beyond the scope of this blog series to provide details about each and every translation, a very small subset of covers for translated editions can be viewed below. These include editions in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Russian.
Continuation of the series
Over the past 20 years, perhaps the most frequently asked question I’ve received as the owner of 17th Street relates to whether the series will ever be continued. Although the idea of a third novel was floated on and off in interviews with Caleb Carr following The Angel of Darkness’ publication (see Part Four), it wasn’t until 2016 that the long-awaited announcement was made: Mulholland Books would be publishing two new Alienist novels intended to ‘bookend’ the series. More exciting still, the books would shed light on the two most enigmatic characters in the series: Miss Sara Howard and Dr. Kreizler himself.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
