The problem with the traditional mystery critics such as Edmund Wilson (Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?) have pointed out is that in order to be a satisfactory puzzle, motive and opportunity must be available to everyone; there is no particularity to murder or specificity to the murderous personality. Instead, the narrative must be contrived in such a way as to render indistinguishable the fractal culpability of the travellers in the Calais Coach.
Good writers, defenders of the mystery, have made a strong case on the other side; what Wilson sees as limitation, Barzun or Chandler see as a positive aspect. Putting murder into the streets (or leaving it in the castle) amongst the people with whom it belongs proves only that our potential is limitless and that motive is ex post facto. Certainly, the arguments are at their most pristine, show themselves most carefully opposed in what the Chicago press and District Attorney called in 1924 "The Crime of The Century."
Two brilliant (or at least highly credentialled) students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, abducted Bobby Franks, the public school classmate of Loeb's brother, suffocated him in the back of a rented car, killed him with a chisel and (possibly) sodomized him. Apprehended a week later—there had been an appalling number of mistakes, evidence left at the site, a typewriter in Leopold's possession used to write ransom notes—Loeb and Leopold made it clear that they were willing to explain the Crime of the Century to the world: There was no motive. The idea, Leopold said (he was the metaphysician of the two, a first-year law student at the University of Chicago) was to produce a pure Nietzchian gesture, the ubermensch proving his superiority by committing a crime in a vacuum. The purpose of the Franks murder was that there was no purpose, Leopold insisted and somehow, as the crime resonated through the decades and as Meyer Levin thinly fictionalized some of its aspects in his 1956 novel, the Franks murder became a foreshadowing of Nazism, of the technologizing and profusion of mass murder, of the horrors of the century to come from Speck to Oswald to Hiroshima to Cambodia . . . murder accomplished, for its own sake, devoid of personal connection, stripped of psychic necessity or predilection. A boon for those who had known all along that you had to care who killed Roger Ackroyd because even the butler could have done it; terrifying for Edmund Wilson, Leslie Fiedler or District Attorneys everywhere who needed to see a particularity of motive, a pure necessity of connection in order to isolate murder, to put its commission (and one's own vulnerability of course) at some distance.
As we know, as Levin's novel with its heavy Freudian cast and dazzling final chapters indicates, the Franks murder was apparently anything other than motiveless. Leopold and Loeb were homosexuals (Leopold the active, Loeb the passive partner), Franks served as surrogate for Loeb's hated younger brother who had displaced Loeb from his mother's embrace. Leopold's participation in the murder of a rich, assimilated Jewish version of his younger self was a symbolic suicide-and-rebirth; the burial site, the dissolution of the boy's genitals symbolic gestures replete with Freudian compression and cunning. Loeb and Leopold, rather than being ubermensch, were figures which we came to recognize all too well, surrogates for our own lunatic other selves, gone over the wall of protection, trashed in the culvert which absorbed not only Bobby Franks but themselves.
They were convicted—Clarence Darrow's eloquent plea might have saved them from hanging although Caverley, the judge, claimed that he remitted the death sentence only because of the "extreme youth" of the defendants—and imprisoned them for life plus ninety-nine years. Loeb was murdered in prison in rather muddy circumstances in 1940, stabbed to death by a fellow inmate in a shower. He might have been the victim of jealousy or a love affair, but then again he might have been indulged in a luck which had definitively run out in 1924. Leopold applied for parole again and again, finally got it in 1959 partly as a consequence of the sympathy which Compulsion in novel, play and movie form brought to him, married the woman with whom he had been in prison correspondence, became a lab technician in Puerto Rico and died in 1972. While still incarcerated he had sued Levin, not so much for misrepresenting his person as for appropriating (without compensation) Leopold's very life to write a bestselling novel. He won initially but eventually in a landmark case the judgement was overturned and Levin was found not at all liable: One cannot copyright one's life, only one's work. Leopold's own autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (which he claimed failed to become a bestseller only because Levin had stolen and published the story first) does not show a great deal of insight nor contribute much to the motivic argument. On an early page he calls Dickie Loeb the finest, most wonderful person he has ever met, someone who was tragically misunderstood and who might have committed one great mistake but who was otherwise flawless and to whom Leopold will refer to negatively not at all in these pages. Nor will he discuss the crime. Leopold keeps his promise. (He had broken an earlier one: He told the police at the beginning of his confession that "I will tell you the full meaning and nature of the crime.")
Higdon's factual work, published obscurely by Putnam's a generation after Compulsion and with no impact, actually adds useful information to a circumstance which Compulsion had seemingly exploited to the fullest. Higdon updates the material, of course (Leopold's suit and his later life fall beyond the arc of Compulsion) and also gives the fullest available account of Loeb's mysterious death. It also includes transcripts of the psychiatric testimony on the specific nature of the homosexual acts committed by Leopold and Loeb. This is material which had been suppressed at the trial (the psychiatric testimony was taken out of presence of spectators) and in the newspapers (which had full access to the stolen psychiatric transcripts, the defense having paid for an elaborate investigation of Loeb and Leopold by the best alienists they could find, but which declined to publish these accounts). In many ways—as one could have inferred from Compulsion and which becomes evident in light of traditional Freudian perspective—the nature of those homosexual acts prefigured the commission of the crime while also functioning as an inversion of the apparent relationship of Loeb and Leopold (Loeb had been depicted as the brains of the outfit and had so boasted to the psychiatrists).
The crime had an obsessive hold upon the public imagination in its time; even as it faded for the decades before Compulsion was published, even as it has faded again in the even greater span of time since the Levin novel was published, it maintains a kind of obsessive insistence, one which Ellroy notes in his introduction. From the beginning, evidently, we have been trying to ascribe motive and implication to the murder of Bobby Franks because if it cannot be found, if (as Christie or Lord Dunsany imply) anyone could have done it or not done it, then the horror of the circumstance becomes magnified. Levin gives us this explanation, a kind of easeful death: The crime was one of passion, the boys were a folie á deux, had they not come together in just this way at that time, Bobby Franks might be seventy-six years old today and a distinguished industrialist, Leopold might be a retired Federal justice. But the reassuring aspects of Compulsion give less comfort as the decades grind on; although it is difficult in the wake of Kennedy, King, Hitler, the Holocaust, Speck or Bremer, Laurie Dann or Manson to see this pathetic, dreaming, drowning scuffle in the back seat of a rented sedan as the Crime of the Century, it is impossible to reject those acts as well; somewhere between accident and destination, Leopold was caught in thrall and Franks died, the implacable Loeb called out his instructions and Levin borrowed a persona and leaned over them in that car like one of Macbeth's witches and the argument goes on. The novel, perhaps the earliest modern docudrama persists but its argument to me is shaking. Ex post facto applies: Anything in retrospect can be rationalized. Loeb, Leopold and circumstance came together, explanations came later, Wilson, an enormous pseudo-academic fraud was wrong and Christie was on the hunt of night. For if his century has taught us one lesson it is this: if something can happen, it will.