As the novel's popularity spread - it went on to sell millions of copies worldwide - megaproducer Scott Rudin was trying to figure out how to get it into theaters.Ī top film executive for more than 30 years who was named head of production at 20th Century Fox by age 29, Rudin is legendary for his output (seven movies this year alone), his savagery toward underlings and his literary bent.

Richly imagined, cinematically evocative of its setting in a New York City where baronial wealth is juxtaposed with squalor and poverty, and driven by a story about an increasingly desperate hunt for a killer who gruesomely murders boy prostitutes, 'The Alienist' was scooped up by Hollywood before it arrived on bookstore shelves. Such an attitude has come from fighting about adaptations of 'The Alienist' almost since it was published, all the while continuing his other writing, including as a respected military historian who worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and contributed to Foreign Affairs Quarterly and MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. He doesn't sound bitter or even resigned. 'I've had nothing to do with this show,' he says. He asked, to no avail, to have himself taken out of the credits as a consulting producer. That fact - that the original creator of the story hasn't seen the full finished version - indicates how removed Carr ultimately became from the making of the series.

'I don't know how the series is going to do,' says Carr, chatting on the phone last week from his home in Cherry Plain, a hamlet in the town of Berlin.

The Alienist by Caleb Carr