The Alienist - Caleb Carr [264]
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,