By Michael F. Duggan
Caleb Carr is gone at 68. The military historian and author of The Alienist crime drama series, died of cancer on May 23.
I liked his gritty historical crime fiction about the mean streets of New York City in the 1890s. Time will tell if he will be considered an important writer, but The Alienist, his magnum opus, is a real page turner and is based on a brilliant historical-fictional premise, terrific characters (including historical figures like J.P. Morgan and a somewhat muted Theodore Roosevelt). It also evinces deep psychological understanding and insight. It was an international best seller in 1994. An abusive childhood at the hands of his father, the Beat generation editor and convicted killer, Lucien Carr, likely made him the distinctive—unique—if eccentric figure he became.
Carr tended to overwrite, in my opinion, and yet his style is not oppressive. It gallops like a runaway horse in the Bowery. His writing has more in common with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other 19th century storytellers than it does with more modern authors, like his father’s hipster pals. Like Nietzsche, he deals with the budding world of modernity, but he does not feel comfortable with the brave new world, and the late 19th century of Jacob Riss and Maggie of the Streets serves him well as a dark, in between time.1 Like Holmes’s gas lit London, Carr’s early electrified New York is modern enough for reason and science to eventually triumph, but his world of inner and outer landscapes is more realistic than those earlier stories, darker, more problematic. He gives us more of the city’s shadow than sunshine. Still, it is no coincidence he was approached by the estate of Conan Doyle to write a new Sherlock Holmes adventure. The result was The Italian Secretary (2009).
The three Alienist books and the cable TV series made from the first two, are dark, nightmarish, the first dealing with a Ripper-like serial killer of young male prostitutes. Having watched a number of Carr’s interviews, it was impossible for me to reread the first book or watch the TV version without seeing Carr or elements of his life in his characters. I don’t like to psychologize authors, and yet I constantly saw him in the victimized children (to include adult protagonists and antagonists). I saw in his adult characters as both good and flawed parents trying to be better, or else monsters who create subsequent generations of abusers, if they do not kill them outright (by his own account, he was attracted to Theodore Roosevelt by the exotic fact that he was a good father). Dark stuff, and yet it is still life-affirming. Even with all of their blood, violence, and psychopathic bad guys, good wins out in the end. Carr did not like autobiographical novels, and yet his are filled with almost distracting echoes of the violence and desperation of his own early life. Robert Graves writes that poetry is psychotherapy, and yet, great literature must rise above the revelations of one’s own talking sessions.2
Overall I like Carr’s books and found him to be an interesting person. A self-described misanthrope, he once created a stir with the observation that if a few more things had gone wrong with his early life, he might have become a serial killer himself. The deep psychological insights and preoccupations of this books lead one to the conclusion that this is not a casual remark. He was an historian before he was a fiction writer, and he has the habit of providing a little too much specific period detail in his fictional depictions (in stark contrast to the modernist spontaneity of the Beats). I will leave it for others to determine whether his books are art or, like most murder mysteries, entertainment.
Carr’s final work was about a Siberian cat named Masha who lived with him for 17 years and predeceased him. In an interview shot in the fall of 2023 for CBS Sunday Morning, he said that he had promised Masha that he would someday make her famous “because you deserve to be a legend,” and that he hoped to live long enough to see the book published. My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, came out in April, a little over a month before Carr died.3
- In his June 5, 2005 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Carr observes that “The modern world is a very uncomfortable place for me.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrt8Pir7jA ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BQRyzQm2Vk ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zqGaXl1Zg0 ↩︎