Death Becomes Him

"Living in New York is really like being in a perpetual abusive relationship," declares Caleb Carr, twin saucers of light reflecting off his rimless glasses as he stares out the window of the Shelbourne Hotel's luxurious Princess Grace Suite onto a gloriously bright and sunny Dublin day. "You know, a lot of people who live there hate it but can't seem to get out of it. It's bizarre. There's a great quote from William James which really sums it up. He was also born in New York but then he moved to Boston to teach in Harvard. And he said , 'when you're living in New York every place else in the world seems unbearably insipid, and then when you're living somewhere else you can't imagine how anybody lives in New York'. And that's basically the point. I come here to Dublin or some other place like this and I think, 'why in God's name do I live in New York City?'. It's a horror! And then when you're in New York, you think about going anywhere else - you just can't imagine it! Like I say, it's a really strange abusive relationship. Hard to get out."
New York City has been home for 43-year-old Caleb Carr for most of his life. It's hardly surprising then that the city is also his main inspiration, providing the setting for both of his best-selling novels. However, the New York of his fiction is turn-of-the-century rather than modern day Manhattan. Both his best-selling psychological thrillers The Alienist and its follow-up The Angel Of Darkness feature the same team of investigators - led by the eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (possibly the greatest fictional sleuth since Sherlock Holmes) - who track serial killers by use of Cracker-style detective work.
The real star of the books, however, is the city itself, which Carr has painstakingly depicted with an astonishing eye for historical detail. All of the streets and buildings which his characters visit, as well as the restaurants they dine in and the trains and boats they travel on, actually existed 100 years ago, and Carr's descriptions of everything from the masonry detail of the Moorish Room in Cornelius Vanderbilt's house to the schedules of the passenger steamers running the Hudson River are apparently spot-on. Did recreating 1890's New York so accurately require much research?
"Not really," he shrugs. "When I was a kid I was always interested in history so I would just pick it up as I was walking around. I spent a lot of time outside the house (laughs) so I'd pick it up wherever I went. So a lot of the research in the books was a matter of just growing up with it. You know, I didn't set out consciously to research it. I don't think I could write a book in that much detail about Dublin, say. If I moved here I'd have to be here for years before I'd understand it well enough. It's not just to describe it but also to understand the rhythm of it, how it feels, how it works, how it lives."
History has always been important to Caleb (he majored in history and politics at NYU) and, in addition to his novels, he has also written a biography of a 19th century American mercenary entitled The Devil Soldier and - perhaps surprisingly for somebody who was educated at a Quaker School - contributes regularly to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal Of Military History. He attributes his interest in the past to an emotional response to an unsettled upbringing in a rather wild and intense household.
"I grew up in a very crazy household and I think I had a real sense of needing to know that there were things that had come before and that things would go on after," he explains. "Nothing would last forever, everything passes. I think that's where a lot of the original interest in history came from emotionally. And I guess I didn't really have anybody around me - particularly I didn't have any men around me that I looked up to in my own life - so I think I sort of had these romantic historical heroes instead. So history became very important."
Caleb Carr lived in the West Village from his birth in 1955 until his parent's divorce in 1962, when he was forced to move to a seedy and sometimes dangerous block between Second and Third Avenues. He had a tempestuous relationship with his father Lucien - an ex-UPI reporter who introduced William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to one another, and was often a partner in their adolescent antics. Young Caleb grew up with the most famous American literary figures of the mid-century in his home and was often kept awake at night as the Beats drank and argued until the wee small hours. Far from being impressed by them, he found them anarchic and scary people who had no real concept of family life and children.
"When you're an adult they looked very interesting and alluring but when you were a kid they were just very noisy and very scary," he recalls. "For instance, Burroughs was a very nice man but when you were a kid he was one scary fella to find yourself face to face with in the hallway. A very strange man. You knew there was something that wasn't quite right about him and you didn't know what it was but, for some reason, you always just wanted to go the other direction."
Did you keep in touch with any of them as you grew older?
"Not so much with Burroughs but with Ginsberg, always, yeah," he nods. "Allen was always at my brother's house for Christmas and he was always a really supportive person. The great thing about Allen was he didn't care what it was you were doing. I mean, nothing could have been more different from what he did than what I do. But he didn't care that it was different. It was the fact that I was doing it and that I believed in it. He was always very supportive of anything that anybody did, if they were honest, you know, if they really cared about it then it didn't matter what they were doing. If you were writing TV sitcoms, if it was what you really believed in, he would support it."
As it happens, Carr's association with the Beats very nearly became a family affair. Literally. Shortly after his parent's divorce, one of his father's beatnik friends asked Caleb's mother, Francesca von Hartz, to marry him. She declined, thus denying Caleb the rather strange prospect of having none other than Jack Kerouac for a stepfather.
"Yeah," he laughs, when I mention it. "My folks split up when I was seven and then my mother, in her infinite wisdom, decided to marry another alcoholic writer. But when she split up with my father, Jack Kerouac did ask her to marry him. And she married this other guy who was a writer and an alcoholic, but unsuccessful. And I used to look at her and just say, 'if you were gonna pick another alcoholic writer to marry, why couldn't you pick the one that was successful so we could have lived in a nice house, in a nice neighbourhood'." (laughs)"
Do you remember Kerouac well?
"Oh yeah, he was always a great guy," he nods enthusiastically.
He died a very sad way though. Alcoholic, destitute and disillusioned with everything the Beats had achieved . . .
"Yeah, he drank himself to death," Carr sighs. "He didn't really turn his back on things though. He really believed in what they were doing in the '50s but when the '60s . . . It's basically like when all the alternative stuff happened in the late '80s and the early '90s and then it got merchandised and now it's become this mainstream marketing version of it. And the '60s did that with what they were trying to do in the late '40s. He believed in what they were trying to do when they were pioneering it but when the '60s came along and every idiot was growing their hair long and considering themselves to be members of this generation that he had helped found, he didn't so much turn his back on it as he turned his back on the stupidity of the '60s. And there was a lot of stupidity in the '60s in America. And that disappointment was what caused him to become more reactionary and more conservative."
As it happens, Lucien Carr's place in New York's history isn't just simply literary. Eleven years before Caleb's birth, the elder Carr murdered a Beat hanger-on named David Kammerer in Riverside Park and dumped his body in the Hudson River. On Burrough's advice he turned himself into the police and eventually served two years for the fatal stabbing before going on to become a distinguished journalist. Caleb didn't actually learn about the incident until he was nearly 20 years of age.
"I never even knew that story about my father until I was 19," he says. "I mean, I knew that my father was a very tempestuous person. Unfortunately, he was a very troubled and violent and alcoholic person. But I never knew the specifics of that story until I was already grown up and in college. It was a big secret within the family and then I found out by accident."
Were you shocked when you heard?
"I was actually," he admits. "I wish somebody had told me at an earlier age only because it would have helped explain a lot of my relationship to him."
Did you have a violent relationship with your father?
"Yeah. When I was very young it was a violent relationship. I don't want to get into it too deeply but certainly it was one of the crucial things in my life."
Do you not think it's a touch ironic that the son of a convicted murderer grew up to write novels about murderers and the criminally insane?
"Yeah, I suppose it is," he smiles wryly. "I don't really favour writing that is the pseudo-autobiographical style where you basically write your life story and call it a novel. It's not my particular dish. But there's definitely an awful lot of personal stuff in the book."
Like the fact that the Kreizler character had a violent relationship with his own father?
"Oh yeah - intellectually he's very much my alter-ego," he admits. "I tried to disguise it as much as I could by making him German-Hungarian, all these red herrings. Because people would always try to say to me, 'which character are you supposed to be?'. Those kinds of games are always so ridiculous. And people are always a little afraid when I say, 'you know, there are parts of me in everybody in these books - there's parts of me in the villains. There's part of me in the killer too!' People start moving away from me when I say that (laughs)."
Not all of Carr's characters are fictional however. Both The Alienist and The Angel Of Darkness feature cameos from a number of real life historical figures, some better known than others - most notably Theodore Roosevelt, then the City's Police Commissioner, who essentially sets the whole plot of The Alienist in motion.
"Well, actually everybody in the books is real except for the central characters of the investigation," he explains. "Everybody else, all the other characters that appear, are real pretty much. The gang leaders were real, all the murder cases they read about in the newspapers were real. That's the kind of detail I had to go into to make it believable."
Was there any particular reason for you doing that?
"Well, my feeling is that writers really have a responsibility to educate in some way," he says. "Very few writers I think can educate emotionally and spiritually. Most think they can but I think very few can. I think Ginsberg, for instance, was an example of someone who could. But I think that people like that come along very rarely. My ability to educate is definitely in the realm of where mankind and society come from historically, where it is and where it's going. That's definitely where my talent lies." n
* The Angel Of Darkness by Caleb Carr is published by Little, Brown ... Co (#9.99 Stg).