"The Alienist" from Page to Screen

When Caleb Carr's historical thriller, The Alienist, was published in 1994, it quickly became one of my favorite contemporary novels. Set on the dark, gritty streets of fin-de-siècle New York, the novel follows a group of amateur detectives, led by forensic psychiatrist (or, "alienist") Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, as they search for a serial killer. It has, inevitably, been compared to the Sherlock Holmes books.

It seemed certain that The Alienist would be adapted to the big screen. According to the New York Times, "movie rights were sold for half a million dollars before the book was even published." But it's a dense book with many characters, and no producer could get it right. "It's been 25 years of battling against really bad interpretations of this book," Carr told the New York Times.

Until now. On January 22, when the TNT network debuts a ten-episode series that takes the book from beginning to end, starring Daniel Brühl as Kreizler; Luke Evans as newspaper reporter John Moore; and Dakota Fanning as NYPD secretary Sara Howard (pictured above). The Times reported that it is the "most expensive series in TNT's history," which appears to have paid off. The Hollywood Reporter reviewed the first episodes, calling them "full of solid performances and gorgeous, creepy visuals." Watch the official trailer here.

The good news continues. While Carr followed up with a sequel, The Angel of Darkness, in 1997, and has written several other books since, he hasn't returned to the world of Dr. Kreizler and his crime-fighting cohorts. That changes this fall, when a new novel, The Alienist at Armageddon, is scheduled to arrive.

If you're just getting caught up on Carr, a TNT tie-in paperback was just published by Random House that has a pretty cool cover (pictured below).

Images via IMDB and Penguin Random House