What do Clarence Darrow, Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and James Ellroy have in common?The answer is ‘Compulsion’, the 1956 novel by Meyer Levin based on the infamous murder case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who in 1924 killed a 14 year old boy named Bobby Franks simply for the thrill of doing so and getting away with the crime. (They didn’t). You may recall (or you may not) that I was writing about–and posting interviews with–the great novelist James Ellroy a few weeks ago. In one of them he was asked to name the novels he was most influenced by and ‘Compulsion’ was one of them. (The others were ‘True Confessions’ by John Gregory Dunne, ‘Libra’ by Don DeLillo and another which I’m currently blanking on). I was surprised that ‘Compulsion’ was among them. I’m not sure quite why but I always had the impression that the novel bordered on the sensational and that it wasn’t a ‘serious’ work–more a flashy re-telling of the hideous crime that gripped America in the early 1920s. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I spent the past few days reading it and, aside from some dated and rambling ruminations on homosexuality and theories as to how this impacted the crime, it’s an excellent example of the so-called ‘non-fiction novel’, preceding Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ by a decade and Mailer’s ‘The Executioners Song’ by two. I must have seen the movie years ago, chopped up for local television commercials, but have little memory of it.

Leopold and Loeb were represented by Clarence Darrow who was famously and strenuously an early opponent of capital punishment. Darrow realized that the case was hopeless in terms of proving the young men innocent–they left a string of clues behind them and confessed prior to receiving consul. So Darrow instead put the death penalty on trial and managed to spare them their lives, getting them life sentences ‘plus 99 years’. Ultimately Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936 and Leopold was released on parole shortly after ‘Compulsion’s publication, a model example of prison rehabilitation. Orson Welles portrayed Darrow in the 1958 film–Levin renamed all the real people for reasons I’m not sure of and Darrow became Jonathan Wilk. Levin reprints much of Darrow’s actual 12 hour summation at the end of the novel. So stirring and moving was Darrow’s plea for mercy that I decided to learn more about the lawyer. And beyond the quick study of his Wikipedia entry, what better way than to watch Henry Fonda’s acclaimed one-man show about Darrow on Youtube? Fonda’s incomparable performance encompasses a number of Darrow’s always riveting and emotional courtroom monologues as well as many amusingly dry personal observations on life, mankind and human fallibility. I urge you to watch the above video. It’s a thrilling performance and an elucidating journey into one man’s noble, frustrating and often amusing (in a bleak sort of way) quest for justice and human progress. And read Levin’s book! It’s a page turning, good old-fashion crime and punishment epic. If you like it, you and I have James Ellroy to thank for turning us onto it.