Leopold & Loeb: The Crime of the Century (1975) By Hal Higdon

The competition from Chicago alone includes many legendary crimes: John Wayne Gacy, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre & the entire Capone-era, Silas Jayne, the Spilotro brothers, and Richard Speck; yet only the Leopold & Loeb murder earned the moniker of The Crime of the Century.  Although the crime took place 88 years ago, its major details are still well known.  Hal Higdon’s book on the crime, trial and aftermath fills in the less current details in a manner that leaves one rapidly turning to the next page, as though it were a “who done it” on a best seller list. 

The book recaps the true story of a pre-meditated murder, with a victim picked at random.  The victim, Bobby Franks, and his murderers Nathan Loeb and Richard Leopold Jr., were all college students living in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, then the address of the city’s elite.  What was their motive?  It is thought to have been curiosity, thrill, and a belief that their intellectual superiority entitled them to test out if they could commit the perfect crime.

If you are a resident of Chicago, the names and places are completely familiar. The book reads much like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City in its connection to the city’s geography and social structure.  An equally frightening comparison would be Gene O’Shea’s nonfiction book Unbridled Rage: A True Story of Organized Crime, Corruption, and Murder in Chicago detailing the murder of three boys who disappeared on their way to a movie in the Loop in 1955, but expanding well beyond that incident.

The book Leopold & Loeb plays out on so many levels that it is difficult to structure.  First of course, is the crime story itself.  How these two young men planned this murder down to minute detail, and yet in retrospect, seemed to want to get caught.  In fact, in those days, long before the Miranda decision, they confessed to nearly everything, even aiding police in locating missing evidence, seemingly pleased with their efforts, though disappointed they made an error.

Yet another level involves the time period, 1924, the mid-point of Prohibition, the ascendancy of the Capone reign of terror in Chicago.  Yet the endless front page coverage that summer wasn’t about Al Capone, Bugsy Malone or blatant police corruption, it was about two egg-heads, one even an ornithologist, who committed just one of the 177 murders registered in the city in the first six months of the year. 

It was the period of Chicago history immortalized in The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when six daily newspapers fought for circulation by trying to out scoop and out sensationalize each other.  The story was ready made: two kids from good families, prominent in the business community, students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, both with genius IQ’s, and rumored to be “perverts,” an emphasis considered more damaging than the murder.  And it was a story with the never completely answered question: why?

And then there was the trial, with the combatants being a States’ Attorney whose political career could be made, or broken, by the case; versus Clarence Darrow, arguably the most famous attorney in American history, and himself a Chicago resident.  The murder case was almost incidental to the two legal questions fought over: the moral underpinning of the death penalty; and the claim of mental illness as a mitigating factor in criminal responsibility.

And then there was the post-trial story, which extended to the summer of 1974.

Summer reading does not get more engrossing than this.

Death Is A Lonely Business (1985) By Ray Bradbury

A month ago Ray Bradbury died just shy of his 92nd birthday.  All I knew about him was that he was an incredibly successful writer in the “future fiction” genre.   His first big commercial success was with The Martian Chronicles, published back in 1950.  I’m not really sure why, but I don’t recall having read any of his works, though I did see the movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  

In a case of good timing, a friend sent me Bradbury’s book Death is a Lonely Business a few weeks ago.  It is set in Venice, California, circa 1949, as the menagerie that was the Venice Pier is being torn down in an early version of re-gentrification.  All of the book's characters are part of the world being left behind, be they academics, former opera divas from Chicago or silent film stars -- yes, there is a variation of Norma Desmond!

The main character is a struggling young writer living in the Venice fog.   One night the writer comes across a body that has somehow become entangled in an abandoned circus lion’s cage, submerged at high tide.  The rest of the book involves the writer’s quest to investigate this incident, and convince the local detective that it’s part of a pattern of serial killings.  An important subplot is convincing this same detective to complete his own unfinished book.

While the plot construction of Death is a Lonely Business might be a tad convoluted, it’s easy to pick out the reasons for Bradbury’s success as a writer.  I dog-eared about a dozen pages that condensed into a few sentences what could easily be stand-alone novels, my favorite tells of a dream.

"I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal’s chair in his empty shop.  Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!

In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, and the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to perma-frost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulations their teeth were icicles.  Suddenly I was the outsider.  The wind from their mouths blew cold on me.  I had changed forever.  I could not be forgiven."

From Wikipedia, I learned that the “green town in northern Illinois” alludes to Waukegan (just north of Chicago) where Bradbury was born.   Although this was not my plan, my decision to read this book was influenced by Bradbury’s death – which seems appropriate because it is a murder mystery dedicated to the memory of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two of the masters of that genre.