CARR, Caleb. The Alienist. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2013.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 496 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Random House, 1994.

Caleb Carr (1955–2024) was born in Manhattan, the son of Lucien Carr — one of the founding figures of the Beat Generation — and grew up surrounded by the literary culture his father moved in, before turning decisively toward history. He studied military history at New York University and pursued a doctorate in military and diplomatic history at the University of London. His preoccupations — the psychology of violence, the emergence of forensic science, the social history of nineteenth-century New York — were unusual combinations for a novelist, and The Alienist is the product of that unusual combination. It won the 1995 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and launched one of the most distinctive series in American historical crime fiction. Carr died on 28 March 2024; signed copies of his work carry the significance of a posthumous signature from a writer who found his audience on both page and screen.

The title is a period term. An "alienist" was what the nineteenth century called a doctor who treated those considered aliéné — estranged from their own minds — and the term carried with it both the authority of emerging science and the profound social unease that any systematic investigation of the human interior provoked in its time. Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is an alienist in 1896 New York, and when the mutilated body of a boy prostitute is found on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt — newly appointed, ambitious, and willing to try methods his department would not officially sanction — turns to Kreizler for help. The team Kreizler assembles includes journalist John Schuyler Moore and Sara Howard, a woman working as a secretary at police headquarters who is possessed of considerably more investigative intelligence than anyone around her is willing to acknowledge.

What follows is a criminal investigation conducted along lines that the Gilded Age establishment is constitutionally unwilling to accept: the assembly of a psychological profile of an unknown killer from the details of his crimes, his known behaviour, and the shape of the damage his childhood must have done to him. Carr deploys his historical scholarship throughout — the New York of Tammany Hall corruption, immigrant tenements, and Vanderbilt mansions is precisely rendered — but the novel's enduring power comes from its central argument, which is that the mechanisms of violence are not mysterious but legible, and that the courage to read them honestly is the hardest part of the work.

The novel was adapted into a miniseries for TNT in 2018 and subsequently for Netflix, introducing Kreizler and Moore to a new generation of readers. A third novel in the series, The Alienist at Armageddon, was promised but remained unfinished at Carr's death.

Near fine. A few mild markings here and there; otherwise fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000538