Caleb Carr

Interviewed by Barry Forshaw

Some authors may toil ceaselessly for years before achieving a modicum of success. Others may be catapulted into the limelight after only a couple of books. Caleb Carr is of the latter breed: the remarkable acclaim that greeted The Alienist two years ago looks set to be followed up by similar attention for Angel of Darkness, recently published in this country by Little, Brown. Carr's speciality is a canny synthesis of the Holmesian novel of deduction, a Thomas Harris-style pursuit of a serial killer, and the detailed topography and historic verisimilitude of Doctorow's Ragtime. While Carr's preternaturally brilliant detective/alienist Laszlo Kreizler is at the centre of the books, there is a shrewd strategy at work in allocating the peripheral characters their share of the limelight in successive books. Speaking to Carr in a Knightsbridge hotel, I found him a curious mixture of the engaging and the eccentric. He has no false modesty about his achievements, but (unlike many a crime author) is not upset by what he perceives as negative criticism.

You're talking to movie types at present over options for The Alienist. Who's going to play your female protagonist Sara Howard – Sharon Stone?
I favour Gwyneth Paltrow. If, that is, it ends up as a star vehicle. There are many lesser known actresses who'd be fine, but the producers might be determined on this issue.

And Anthony Hopkins as the eponymous alienist?
He's too old now. However, if he expressed an interest, I'd certainly be happy. And what about Ralph Fiennes? I'm battling with the producer who wants to turn it into a love story. But there isn't a love story in the book, and that's what people like about it. Classic Hollywood nonsense, of course.

So you're ready to be royally screwed by Hollywood á la Faulkner, etc?
I'm already being screwed like William Faulkner, in that I worked in Hollywood for some time. I'm actually being screwed in a fully participatory fashion, rather than from afar.

The essence of your books lies in the immense accumulation of detail. Although this will indirectly help the look of any movie, it will surely lose your tone of voice.
Well, ironically, they are saying to me that it's so much trouble to adapt my books because of the detailed description. And I reply that the actual story isn't, essentially, that difficult to translate. Often, I purposely chose to describe buildings that are still there in New York. You can easily shoot the Flatiron Building, and with what George Lucas and Industrial Light and Magic are now doing, it is possible to window-dress it with marvellous period detail.

I don't want to sound like a dog worrying a bone, but surely you can concentrate your description on a very specific aspect of period detail, whereas a movie has to, perforce, show the entire scene and lose that focus?
Yes, I hadn't thought of that. Well, the viewers will just have to catch it as they can. I feel, anyway, that whatever I can impart to people through the books is all to the good. Do you know that Random House didn't want to call the book The Alienist? They said, "Nobody will know what the hell an alienist is". My reply to that is, "So what? When people read the book they'll realise that an alienist is an early form of psychologist and they've learnt something". I'm never intimidated by the fact that people don't know things. They can learn things, can't they?

You have a sense of mission as a writer – and here's an example of it. Are you a frustrated educationalist?
No! I feel a writer has two jobs: to educate and to entertain. I'm not interested in being treated as a serious novelist, but I am interested in what I think writing should be doing now. Too much of the autobiographical, introspective style of novel being written today is really a dead horse that's being mercilessly flogged. It's a cliché, I know, but people are still desperately thirsty for stories. And in America, where educational standards are falling, I think there's a real importance in the concept of accessible books that teach something. You have to do it in a way that is entertaining to readers. I'm not claiming that I do this quite as well as I'd wish; there are some historical details in my books that seem to me, in retrospect, a little stuck on. It's essential that this sort of thing is organic to the narrative. Maybe I haven't mastered that technique yet.

You're leery of wearing a literary mantle on your own shoulders, but there are more passages of literary description in your books than one is likely to find in anything other than a nineteenth century novel.
Well, I don't see a contradiction there – I see my descriptive passages as purely functional. I don't tend to wax very rhapsodic in my use of language – I go for language that is strictly utilitarian. I think that certainly since Hemingway (and certainly since my father's old friend Jack Kerouac), everything that can be done with language HAS been done. All the experiments you can perform with language have been tried. I do try to keep the description as straightforward as possible – it should serve a function.

You said that you wished to reinvent the serial killer novel. How is it possible to do that when the genre is in danger of (you'll forgive the pun) overkill?
Well I began with the concept of a psychiatrist and a killer who had certain things in common. But I appreciated that this sounded like a hundred other books, and I thought to myself, "What am I going to do to make this distinctive?" So I went for something which wasn't quite a thriller and wasn't quite a historical novel – hopefully it was a new departure. My publishers, of course, said, "What are we going to do with this?" So it was decided to present this as part of a new genre: the psychological/historical thriller. To my editor's credit, she was right behind this idea, but the marketing people were deeply unhappy. They said, "We can't do this – this is too new!"

Surely nobody would say anything like that in publishing, would they?
I had a battle with them – they came around in the end.

Locales are crucial for many writers, but there are few who make a city quite as significant in their narratives as you do New York. Why did you take this approach?
Well, for a start, it's where I grew up. I was born and raised there, and I spent a lot of time on the streets of New York. It's the only city in the world where, for me, if I were homeless it wouldn't be too much of a challenge. And New York IS a character. You could view it as being like in an abusive relationship. You have a relationship with the city: it's not just a place where you live. And you HAVE to have this relationship: it may be love/hate or hate/love, but everybody has some kind of a relationship with the city.

An interesting metaphor. And you mention abuse, which is a significant factor in your books.
Yes, part of the reason I wrote the books was because I was getting so tired with hearing people say, "New York's gotten so rough – it was so charming in the old days, the gay 90s, the golden age…" And I'd look at them and think, "Come on – the city's always been a sinkhole of corruption and crime and absolute degeneracy. That's what I try to address in the books.

Some years ago, one of the broadsheets here ran a piece of reportage about how awful London had become: crime, mugging, not safe to walk the streets, etc. And the joke was that they'd merely made a few cosmetic alterations to a piece written by Charles Dickens about his London. Plus ça change.
Exactly the point I'm trying to make!

You also, of course, present this refraction of the past through a contemporary vision – the use of rent boys, for instance. Unacceptable territory for a nineteenth century writer.
I do have the advantage, as a modern writer, of being able to tackle the things which did exist in that era but couldn't be talked about – certainly not in the novels of the day. And, in the new book, Angel of Darkness, I play with the idea of the "unpublishable" (in the terms of that era) manuscript. And that would have been the case – you would have gone around with a manuscript telling that story and people simply would not have been prepared to touch it.

It's interesting, of course, how in this country people became conscious of the world of male prostitutes and so forth because of the Wilde case. In that buttoned-up society, the unsayable finally became the sayable. In Angel of Darkness, you inaugurate a change of narrator, moving one of the characters in Kreizler's circle centre stage. I must admit I was a bit disconcerted by this, as I like the Watsonian narrator of the first book. But you see the books as having a cluster of narrators?
That was the original idea: that the narration of each book would shift from person to person to person, with each narrator telling the story that was most significant for them. I chose Moore in the first book, as he was the most accessible of the group. He was modern in some ways, and I felt that people would have the least trouble with him. Stevie, the narrator of the second book, was much more of a challenge: not as articulate as Moore, not a professional man, and so forth.

But don't you have to cheat with Stevie? In The Alienist you have an intelligent, articulate narrator, whereas in the new book you have someone who was essentially an urchin, although he's now educated.
Yes, but that's just a question of attitude. Stevie's viewpoint and attitude is just as valid. I didn't have Moore's attitudes myself, so you could say that I had to cheat with him as well. This is really to do with language: the way Stevie views the city is not slumming. He's been there, he has lived in the lower depths, unlike Moore. To a degree, this reflects my background: I lived in an area where it was a question of slumming for the rich kids when they came to buy drugs and act disgracefully, before going back to their well-upholstered homes.

Your books are absolutely the last kind of thing one would expect from someone who's a second generation child of the beat generation.
Well, I'm the reaction. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And that's me.

Were people like Jack Kerouac and Nelson Algren habitués of the family household when you were a child?
It was Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg and that whole crew. But I had my interest in history back then – their world never interested me. I started off on the traditional boy's stuff: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, that sort of thing. I actually read a lot of British fiction, and English history is a specialist subject of mine. I was more interested in English than American history. In this country, just sitting under the statue of General Gordon for the first time was a tremendous thrill for me.

Teddy Roosevelt is utilised by you in a very clever way as a major character. With the decline in educational standards that you talked about earlier, aren't you worried that some of your readers nowadays might not even know who he was?
Like I say, people learn. I have to admit that at readings in the States people have asked me questions like, "Is that where Dr Kreizler really lived?" They have difficulty sorting out the historical from the invented characters. But in the States, because of the name Roosevelt, people might not know exactly who he was, but they're pretty sure he was real. But in the first book, all the gangland figures were real. And in the second book, I use Clarence Darrow as a character, and people have assumed that I created him. It's sad that people don't know who Clarence Darrow was. What kind of job is being done in American schools?

But some people would make the same accusation of British educational standards – kids were recently asked in a survey who this country fought in the Second World War and most of them came up with the Russians. It really is prehistory to them.
A recent survey of American schoolchildren demonstrated that 80% of them couldn't say in which century the American Civil War took place. Of course, I try to "freight in" a little history in the books: Roosevelt, for instance, has made his career leap from one book to the next. And by making Sara a kind of proto-feminist, I still ensure that she's not unrealistically ahead of her time. People are not aware of how many professional women there were in the United States at that time. These women had to give up having husbands and children and the reality was often very different from the view that people have of women then. Many people's attitudes are conditioned by their reading Henry James and Edith Wharton, who only cover a fraction of the reality. There were a lot of women like Sara who worked hard at a job.

You've written about the US government's obsession with secrecy...
I have! That really interests me, as it ties in with my idea that all history is really psychology. National character IS national psychology: all historical questions are biographical and sociological in nature. I don't believe in the Marxist economic theory of history, in social forces being more important than human forces. People make history. If you examine in detail most periods of American history, you can find out why things happened as they did by looking at the neuroses and psychoses of the key figures involved. Take our most awful institution, the CIA. This whole organisation was put together by a man who was a certifiable paranoid schizophrenic, James Forrestal. He ended up hanging himself, after running through the streets naked shouting, "The Russians are after me! The Russians are after me!"

Sounds like he would really have got on well with J.Edgar Hoover.
Hoover looked like a well-balanced man compared to him! All Hoover did was dress up in women's clothing and mooch around in other people's lives. All this is the kind of thing that interests me, within the context of historical thrillers. Hopefully, the movies of the books (if they ever get made) will ensure a continuing interest in what I'm doing – although, in all modesty, I seem to be building up a faithful following anyway.