York magazine, "I'm the only kid in my family who never tried to kill himself...I kind of figured somebody else was going to kill me anyway." Carr's natural father, Lucien Carr, was a writer, who in the 1940s was at the center of a group of as-yet unknown writers (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs). In the summer of 1944, he killed his former scoutmaster, a man who was enamored with him. One night, the scoutmaster supposedly made a move on Lucien Carr, and Carr stabbed him in the chest with his boy scout knife. Carr disposed of the body in the Hudson River, and together he and Kerouac got rid of the knife. Carr was sentenced to two years' jail time and Kerouac a few days. Caleb Carr was "fascinated with the psychology of killers, who were subliminally acting out the pain of being controlled by monstrous parents by controlling and killing victims, seeking a release that would never come." As he explains, "For me it began in New York with the Son of Sam killings while I was in college...I think I can understand some of the kind of rage that's behind what they do. I can't understand the major portion of it because that's what leads to the violence they commit. But I can understand the germ of it." Genre and style The Alienist has been called a detective novel, an historical novel, and a mystery novel. It is set in 1896, "the moment in history when the modern idea of the serial killer became available", eight years after the Jack the Ripper case, and at a time when the word "psychopath" was new to scientists. Like E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, the novel combines fact with fiction. Historical figures such as Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, Anthony Comstock, and J. Pierpont Morgan appear briefly in the novel and interact with the fictional characters. Carr includes period details, such as descriptions of "sumptuous meals of turtle soup au clair, Creole eggs, broiled squab, saddle of lamb a la Colbert and 'a liter of smooth, dark Wurzburger (beer) that had a head as thick as whipped cream'". Themes In an interview with The Record, Carr stated he wanted to entertain the reader, while also staying faithful to the time period. Carr, a historian by training, wanted to find a form of writing where he could meld his interest in