SOURCE: "Serial Killing for Fun and Profit," in New York Magazine, Vol. 27, No. 14, April 4, 1994, pp. 58-62.

[In the following article, based on a conversation with Carr, Dubner discusses the writing and reception of The Alienist as well as Carr's childhood and career.]

Caleb Carr is not above deception. Two years ago, for instance, it was time for the writer to start his next book. Although he had written a coming-of-age novel in 1980, Carr, 38, had been a nonfiction man ever since: politics and history mainly, military history especially. And that's what his publisher—and his readership, small though it was—expected of him.

He gave his editor and his agent a twenty-page proposal for the new book. It would examine a serial killer who roamed New York City in 1896, preying on young male prostitutes, and the three men who united to stop him: John Schuyler Moore, a New York...