And the deals just keep on comin'

Remember Caleb Carr? He wrote this book called THE ALIENIST about 10 years ago which sold like hotcakes and lots of people loved because it was a serial killer thriller set in 1890s New York with a ton of historical detail. The sequel, THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS, wasn't as good and for that matter, neither have his subsequent books. But after several years on novel hiatus, he's baaaack, and he's trying his hand at Sherlockiana:

Bestselling author of The Alienist Caleb Carr's THE ITALIAN SECRETARY, featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigating pair of gruesome murders of two of the Queen's servants, as an ominous shadow falls on the Queen herself, with echoes of the murder of a music teacher and confidante of Mary, Queen of Scots known as the Italian Secretary three centuries before, written with the approval of the Conan Doyle estate, to Will Balliett at Carroll & Graf, for publication in May 2005, by Suzanne Gluck at the William Morris Agency (NA).

Now granted, it sounds kind of hectic and complicated to me, but I've never been as Holmes-obsessed as some others.

(link from the same place I got the previous post from, natch)

UPDATE: The New York Post's Sara Nelson reports on the deal as well and asks the question I wanted to but didn't--why the hell did Carr sign on with Carroll and Graf, which is known for its, shall we say, "modest" advances:

    At first blush, the news seemed strange, as Carr is a mega-selling author who has always published with Random House.

The paperback of his "The Alienist," published by Ballantine (then a softcover sibling of Random), still sells 25,000 copies a year, according to BookScan.

    If anything Carr might have been expected to leave the Bertelsmann-owned publisher to join his longtime editor Ann Godoff, when she created Penguin Press.

    But Carr's agent Suzanne Gluck, co-head of William Morris, says that there is no scandal in the making. Carroll & Graff occasionally publishes short or unusual works from big-name writers, she says.

    Besides, Carr is "hard at work" on a new novel for Random House, with which he has a contract for two books.

It also might have something to do with the fact that the book grew out of a short story commissioned by C&G for an anthology that "ran away from him," and the funny thing about contracts is that most of the time, they have to be honored in some way or another.

 

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[a guy]

And Gluck is old friends with Will Balliett (she used to represent him as an agent; her husband Tom used to work for Balliett).