bookstorey:

Compulsion, Meyer Levin

A few years back during a conversation about Hitchcock, a friend mentioned that they were distantly related to Richard Loeb, who along with Nathan Leopold, became in the 1920s one of the most notorious child killers in American history, upon which the film Rope was based. Leopold and Loeb, influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, believed themselves to be supermen, above the moral code of ordinary men, giving them free will to commit any transgression. To test their philosophical beliefs they set upon the idea of committing the perfect crime: a motiveless killing. This led to the kidnap and murder of a 14 year old boy, after which they tried to extort a ransom from his family. Before Rope, another film was released with Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles, Compulsion, based on the novel of the same name by Meyer Levin.

With echoes of Crime and Punishment the novel is split into two sections: ‘The Crime of the Century’ and the ‘The Trial of the Century.’ The first half, rather than graphically reconstructing the murder, recounts the days leading up the arrest of the culprits; whilst the second part examines their trial and, with the use of psychoanalysis, poses the question of whether the killers acted under free will or compulsion. Although psychoanalysis, with its roots in Freudian thinking was gaining currency during the 1920s, the skepticism of the narrator is enough to ensure that the novel never goes as far as to absolve the murderers from responsibility for their actions.

Sounds like a chilling read. I’ll have to add it to my list