Caleb Carr, whose bestselling 1994 novel The Alienist made the writer a family identify and was tailored right into a 10-episode restricted sequence on TNT, died of most cancers Thursday at his residence in Cherry Plains, New York. He was 68.
His dying was introduced by his brother Ethan Carr to The New York Occasions.
Carr was born on August 2, 1955, right into a New York Metropolis household haunted by violence and abuse: His father was Lucien Carr, a Beat Era journalist convicted of manslaughter for the 1944 killing of his childhood sexual predator. The deadly stabbing, which made headlines and historical past not least as a result of Lucien’s buddy and Columbia College classmate Jack Kerouac helped get rid of the knife, was depicted within the 2013 movie Kill Your Darlings starring Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan.
Caleb Carr would later say that the incident, alongside his personal childhood abuse by the hands of his father, spawned a lifelong obsession with violence, an obsession given inventive voice in The Alienist. The wildly acclaimed and widespread novel was set in nineteenth Century New York Metropolis, and centered on the makes an attempt of a kid psychiatrist, or “alienist” within the vocabulary of the day, to resolve a sequence of murders of boy prostitutes.
Such was the guide’s pre-publication phrase of mouth that Hollywood producer Scott Rudin purchased the movie rights for a reported half-million {dollars}. Paramount Footage quickly joined the venture, and whereas names similar to director Curtis Hanson and playwright David Henry Hwang would turn into hooked up, the costly movie adaptation languished and finally disappeared altogether.
Greater than a decade later, in 2018, TNT aired a restricted sequence model of the novel, with Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning in lead roles. A second sequence, primarily based on Carr’s 1997 sequel The Angel of Darkness, aired on TNT in 2020.
In all, Carr wrote seven novels (together with a 3rd within the Alienist sequence, titled Give up, New York, printed in 2016), a number of non-fiction books and a 2024 memoir titled My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.
Survivors embrace brothers Ethan and Simon; stepsisters Hilda, Jennifer and Christine Speicher; and mom Francesca Cote. Lucien Carr, who served two years in jail for the 1944 Higher West Facet killing of his abuser and stalker David Kammerer, died in 2005 after a 47-year profession as an editor for UPI.