The Alienist

Afterword to the New Edition

Like most wonderful and terrible things, The Alienist was never supposed to happen.

In the early 1990s, I was a military and diplomatic historian whose ideas on both subjects were too extreme to guarantee regular employment. My last two books—a history of American security policy and a biography of a key but overlooked nineteenth-century American mercenary—had received good reviews, but said reviews had not translated into appreciable sales. Even the articles I wrote for historical journals seemed to inspire controversy, while one piece that I wrote for The New York Times Book Review that dared to question the genius of the generals who ran America’s Civil War inspired more hate mail than any single item in that publication’s long history.

And if what I had to say about the past was objectionable, my feelings about the present, the future, and such things as the possibility of a cataclysmic attack on the United States by obscure people and organizations around the world were worrisome enough that it was often hard to get even close associates to publish them.

Such being the case, I began to think about writing fiction, affecting to tell anyone who was interested that my mind could no longer be constrained by mere facts. I had published a novel (what stunk) right after college, and I knew at least that it’s smart policy, if you’re a writer or would-be writer looking for a subject, to try to imagine a book that you yourself would like to read but can’t find. A lifelong interest in crime and the formation of the mind had led me to decide on a psychological thriller, but my grounding in nonfiction would not allow me to be anything but rigorous in my research and approach. This, I soon realized, could get tricky: How do you devise a story that includes the kind of hard science I’d nosed around in without making readers and audiences want to drive ice picks through their own eyes?

I’m not sure just when the idea of focusing on two men—both from abusive backgrounds, one of whom becomes a murderer, the other a hunter of such murderers—came to me. Perhaps it had always been there; perhaps it had been my original method of reconciling the furiously different sides of what had once been my bright but violently angry young self. Whatever the case, the most pressing need was to know why people of such seemingly similar backgrounds could turn out so differently. This was (and remains) the point at which, for my money, most psychological thrillers went wrong: They’re not really psychological investigations at all, but conventionally crafted whodunits, what I call narrative crossword puzzles.

From the first, I was, like most authors, interested in creating something different: in my case, a “whydunit,” a story that could raise hackles even and especially if you knew who the killer was from early on. What I wanted to do was illustrate critical personal moments in a life (or lives) that steadily build and reinforce character and thus become the building blocks of action, rather than trying to spin another variation on the old Aristotelian dynamic of action leading to character. (For if we have learned anything from modern movies, surely it is that action is not necessarily character.) As I conducted my search for illustrative formative events, it occurred to me that I might also echo those same elements of personality and experience in my two main characters’ surroundings.

Being a student of Henry Adams, that grandson and great grandson of presidents who was a prodigious early force in developing a rigorous, scholarly brand of American history, I had long since accepted his central notion that nations, like people, have characters, and that determining those collective identities and behaviors is the most difficult yet most important job of the historian. As I began to look for turning points in the histories of my two main characters, it occurred to me that I might set the tale not in the present but at that point in American history when psychology first evolved far enough from its parent discipline, philosophy, to stand on its own and address dynamic (that is, conscious and voluntary) patterns of human behavior, in addition to merely functional (autonomic and reactive) motivations and actions. In short, the key to making the story unique might be the same discipline that had, in various forms, been my life’s work: history.

It would all depend on finding a moment—not simply a moment in the past into which it might be nifty or quaint to plop a psychological investigator down (that had already been done, wistfully, sometimes well, but in all cases anachronistically, in examples ranging from ancient Rome to medieval England), but rather when actual scientific advances would make it genuinely plausible for such an investigator to exist. How far back in American history could I go and still be able to accurately use even the rudiments of forensic psychology in action and dialogue?

It was at this point that happy coincidences, those partners of any lucky historical novelist, began to appear. It was clear that the earliest I could shoot for in terms of the scientific roots of the tale would be the period during which William James established his psychological laboratory, the first in the United States, at Harvard: the 1870s. True, there had been alienists and other American mental specialists before then, but they were, to a very large extent, rogues, each the advocate of his own system. As a result, none of them had been taught systematically (if they had been taught at all): The academic terrain was conceded to the great German pioneers.

James changed all this, not because he was interested in legal or criminal psychology (he wasn’t; indeed, he was troubled by attempts to take psychological principles so far out of the functional world and into such a dynamic and behavioral world as crime), but because his influence was so universal. You simply could not be a true psychologist in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century without having processed James, without having read and decided where you stood on his Principles of Psychology, the almost unbelievably massive text that was the first truly comprehensive American work of its kind.

I was already inclined to set my story in the city in which I’d been born and grown up, New York, largely because I wanted to help immortalize those ever-threatened parts of the town (was there ever so abused a law as the National Historic Preservation Act, or, more familiarly, the Landmarks Act, of 1966?) that were left, and to do the same for the brief but important period during the 1890s when Theodore Roosevelt (the American leader who has always fascinated me most) was president of the city’s board of police commissioners. Immersed in the facts of TR’s life as I had been in my youth, I figured that there was a good chance that he’d been an undergraduate at Harvard when James had started his psychology laboratory there; but, in the event, my luck was even better than mere coincidence of timing. Roosevelt had actually studied under James—not psychology, true, but comparative anatomy. Which meant that the two main human agents of the historical forces that I wanted to portray (psychology’s advance into the dynamic realm and modern criminological evolution in New York City) could be located in one place and time as backstory, and thus portrayed as personal acquaintances, crossing paths at regular intervals.

All I needed were several fictional characters to fill out the other aspects of the same historical forces and to place them in one historical stewpot, and I’d be under way. Thus were born John Schuyler Moore and Laszlo Kreizler: Moore, the boyhood friend of and fellow Harvard undergraduate to Theodore Roosevelt, and Kreizler, the foreign-born protagonist of the tale as well as the talented but troubled protégé of the great James. Each of them was a conduit into an important world: Moore, as a crime reporter and reprobate, into the city’s nefarious underbelly, and Kreizler, as a crusading alienist, into the madhouses, prisons, and ghettos. Other, subsidiary characters followed: Sara Howard, the aspiring female detective; the Isaacson brothers, masters of the new forensic science; Stevie Taggert and Cyrus Montrose, Kreizler’s left and right hands in dealing with the city’s seamier sides. All were fleshed out until my investigation of early criminology and aberrant psychology had a skeleton, a brain, and a spinal column that were historically, scientifically, and (I hoped) emotionally plausible.

The whole thing struck me as exciting, but, as has been noted, that didn’t necessarily count for much, commercially; and I knew that, no matter how intriguing the idea might be, my editor, Ann Godoff, was still in no mood to let me jump over from nonfiction to fiction. And my agent, Suzanne Gluck, was dubious, too. I needed a plan—that is, another plan, and just as devious as, if less elaborate than, that of the novel….

We did not yet live, then, in the full-blown Information Age, when things like forgery were to become household amusements, to be carried out on laptop computers. But imagination could be made to compensate for that lack, and my own imagination was by now working overtime. Laboring long but exciting hours on one of those old, original IBM PCs, those desktop tanks with kryptonite-green screens whose “graphics” didn’t extend beyond some very rudimentary vector configurations, it is perhaps understandable that my plotting mind turned positively fiendish. I decided to give my agent and editor just what they wanted: a rollicking nonfiction tale. I would present my story to them as actual history, at least at first; then, when I had them hooked, I would reveal the truth—and hope that the resulting screaming did not actually eject me from their respective offices.

As I say, such schemes were far harder to pull off in those days, and I’m not so sure it’s a good thing that they’ve since become so easy. The plan that I’d formulated would require all sorts of phony printed matter, of course, but none of that presented the difficulty of what I was sure would be the thing that would seal the deal: a false visual. To be specific, a simple photograph, “taken” in the first decade of the twentieth century, showing Dr. Laszlo Kreizler visiting Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, years after their shared adventure of pursuing a serial killer in New York City through the unique method of using the latest psychological insights.

Of course, nowadays you can run outside, grab almost any nine-year-old by the ear, slip him twenty bucks, and have him whip you up just such a cut-and-paste Photoshop-finished job in a small fraction of the time it’d take you to explain to him who the hell Theodore Roosevelt was: Thank you, Bill Gates. But back then, I had to do the whole thing by hand: Go through volume after volume of old portraits to find a photo of someone who might resemble Kreizler a little later in his life (it ended up being the composer Edvard Grieg), make sure the scale and lighting fit a picture of TR at his presidential desk that I’d already selected, photocopy (not at home) enough prints to allow me to cut and paste, try and fail, try and fail…and then, when I thought I had it, photocopy (not at home) the glued-together creation with its phony caption and see how it came off.

By today’s standards, it’s primitive, as you will see at the conclusion of this afterword; but by the standards of 1992, I don’t mind saying, it was diabolical genius. When I had the proposal assembled, I tried it first on my agent, Suzanne, who reacted perfectly: She was thrilled with the idea, and thought it would make a great volume of popular history. Then I delivered the news that I wanted to do it in novelized form.

Why? she wanted to know. Wasn’t there enough original research material?

Uh—not exactly…

Suzanne took the revelation of the ruse well, but the news that I wanted to pull the same hoax on my editor brought a long pause. Ann Godoff was destined to become one of the great forces in modern publishing over the next decade, but even in 1992 she could be—quietly formidable might be the best way to put it. Putting an amusing professional ruse over on Ann was not, in short, a game for pikers: I would have to be sure, Suzanne told me, of what it might do to Ann’s overall assessment of my seriousness as an author. I was, said I, but if it was the only way to get her to consider letting me do fiction, and especially this fiction, I was ready.

The proposal was delivered; Ann studied it; Suzanne and I went to her midtown office for the fateful meeting. The high quality of the story was conceded; and then I informed Ann that I wanted to tell it in novel form. She became concerned. Why in God’s name would I make such a decision? Wasn’t there (I’d had practice, on this one) enough primary research material? Were the familial descendants not cooperating? Was—

At last, the truth had to be told, again: There was no other way to write it. Because I’d made the whole story up.

Stoically, Ann sat for several minutes; then she slammed her hand down—hard—on her desk and declared, “God damn it! Nobody’s ever fooled me!”

Well, said I nervously, didn’t that prove what an unprecedentedly plausible book the story would make?

There were a few more nervous minutes, during which I received a critical gaze appropriate to my last remark; and then, as it would so often in the future, Ann’s courage shone through, and the deal was struck. The rest was up to me.

And to my readers, to whom I will add just one last note: The initial enthusiasm and support with which this book was greeted were, of course, beyond my capacity to understand or to ever fully acknowledge. But the fact that both The Alienist and its sequel, The Angel of Darkness, have hung on—or rather, the fact that you have made them hang on—to become standards in the worlds of mystery and historical fiction is really something beyond any author’s imagining. It is the kind of reaction in the hope of which writers keep writing, and which allows them to endure (with varying levels of grace) all those ancillary demons that notoriety breeds. But the relationship between book, readers, and author should always be clear, and always be pure: For me, such has been the case from the start. That I should have occasion to write an afterword to an edition such as this is, if nothing else, testament to that fact.

C.C.

Cherry Plain, New York

April 2006