Compulsion

The mid 1920s introduced Americans to a new type of murder: two immensely wealthy eighteen-year-old university graduates from Chicago randomly kidnapped and murdered a little boy, attempted to obliterate the identity and sex of the body before hiding it and then tried to collect the ransom - simply as an intellectual experiment. Levin attempts to discover the psychology of the two young men, to understand how the two of them, Leopold and Loeb, one of them handsome and popular, the other quiet and scholarly, were capable of an act so far beyond rational understanding. For drama, for horror, and for the deepest kind of compassion and comprehension, COMPULSION has rarely been equaled among contemporary psychological novels.

"A masterly achievement in literary craftsmanship." (New York Times Book Review)

"A graphic and absorbing reconstruction of an infamous crime." (Saturday Review)