Carr, Caleb
Entry updated 26 August 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1955-2024) US military historian, scriptwriter and author, active from the mid-1970s, whose nonfiction, mostly on military matters, culminated in The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians; Why It Has Always Failed and Why It will Fail Again (2002), which advocates preemptive strikes against nations deemed to support terrorists; his optimistic take on the consequences of such actions makes this a document of some historical interest (see Imperialism). He is best known for the Alienist sequence comprising The Alienist (1994) and The Angel of Darkness (1997), both set in a densely atmospheric, heightened version of New York a century ago, but without quite moving into the fantastic, though their basic (anachronistic) premise – a psychologist/detective creates the concept of the psychological profile to track down serial killers, whose crimes may have been committed years in the past – is recirculated in Killing Time: A Novel of the Future (2000). Here a psychiatrist in 2023 uses Information Technology to trace down the twin sisters who, as an exceedingly complicated plot uncovers, killed an earlier American president. The world in which this takes place exhibits familiar Near Future characteristics: Pollution so bad it is unsafe to go outdoors; a Pandemic of some sort which has savagely reduced world population; bad news in the stock market; corruptions of information everywhere (a well-known line from the novel being "Information is not knowledge"). The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (2005) is a fairly successful pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The Legend of Broken (2012) complicatedly puts into the hands of the historical Edward Gibbon a manuscript (itself told in varying voices) dating from the last days of Broken, a marginally Ruritanian Lost Worldat the heart of pre-medieval Europe, which may have carried over the culture of ancient Egypt. The manuscript, which has survived in academic hands into the twenty-first century, is here reproduced in full, with footnotes, at very considerable length.
Carr's screenwriting credits include the sf film The Osiris Chronicles (1998) directed by Joe Dante. [JC]
Caleb Carr
born New York: 2 August 1955
died Cherry Plain, New York: 23 May 2024
works
series
Alienist
- The Alienist (New York: Random House, 1994) [Alienist: hb/from Alfred Stieglitz]
- The Angel of Darkness (New York: Random House, 1997) [Alienist: hb/]
individual titles (selected)
- Killing Time: A Novel of the Future (New York: Random House, 2000) [hb/Kamil Vojnar]
- The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005) [hb/]
- The Legend of Broken (New York: Random House, 2012) [hb/Shasti O'Leary Soudant]
links
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