Thinking About Compulsion
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.
The Shores of Suitability
(Common exegesis of Killers of the Rulers
portends the interrelationship of post-Joycean rhetoric with
post-Shavian political pluralism. Relate this confluence.
Elaborate and discuss. Exemplify.
The Old Hack is having a nightmare. In it, he has returned to academia and is seeking a master's degree at Extension U., which, he hopes, will enable him to find work as an assistant instructor of English. All right, it is a long shot, but he is almost out of ideas. The markets are really hell, and foreign sales have dried up. And he is having big trouble delivering on the one outline he has sold. So the Old Hack has enrolled in English 353A: Science Fiction and the Archetype, because in the catalog it seemed to be an easy three points (no paper required). If he knows anything, he knows science fiction. Right? Well, doesn't he? Now he is taking the final examination in this graduate-level course, which appears to focus on an old Ace Double, Killers of the Rulers. He is especially qualified to deal with this book. He wrote it back in 1957 between wives at the old place on West 89th Street. Even so, the exam is giving him trouble. Big trouble.
* * *
The subtheme of colonic usurpation in its Jungian relevance creates a multileveled tension in Killers of the Rulers, which points toward the induction of three distinct archetypes. Name these archetypes. Elaborate and discuss. Discuss further how a Freudian approach would defeat consummation of the Blue Alien Incursion.
The Old Hack is not sure exactly how he got into this. It all seemed so simple when he enrolled. The reading list, which included many of his old favorites, indicated this would be a snap, to say nothing of the pleasant surprise of finding Killers of the Rulers right in there between More than Human and The Forever Machine. But he suspected that things had begun to go wrong from the start; in the first session the young instructor had begun by speaking of a Manichean influence in the birth of American science fiction, and how the great Fifties novels were an extension of the Fabian theory of Socialism as propounded by the works of G. B. Shaw. The Old Hack had briefly thought of identifying himself when his book came up in November. "I wrote that one," he could have said (it had been written, as had all of the Ace Doubles, and too much of his other stuff, under a pseudonym), but by then he was totally confused. It did not seem wise to admit writing Killers of the Rulers, particularly if he could not understand a word the young instructor was saying about it.
* * *
Produce a 1,000-word monograph interrelating the empire building of Killers of the Rulers with the more pacific vision of More Than Human. Be specific. In what way does Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" inform and influence both works as controlling response? Why does Heartbreak House not apply here?
* * *
Heartbreak House. That's what West 89th Street had been. It was there, drunk and up against a deadline, that he wrote Killers of the Rulers on the kitchen table. The Old Hack hadn't even started it until the weekend before it was due. There had been all that excitement about him and Mabel Sue, and, besides, for a $750 advance (payable in halves) why should he get all upset about churning out this stuff to their convenience rather than his? Even then the book kind of lurched along, what with Betty (wife number one) crying and coming out of the bedroom now and then only to throw another of his paperbacks at him while he sat there typing. Finally he gave up, turned to the Cutty Sark, and took down that 1952 issue of Worlds of If, which he used to bloat up his novelette.
In the end the book was not what he had promised in the outline, but what the hell? Everyone lied and cheated in the small things (he had tried desperately to explain this to Betty); the important commitment was to getting the work done, and to holding on to enough of the advance money to have a good blowout. Despite all the screaming, he had been only three days late, thanks to the Cutty Sark, but then the bastards took a month to deliver the check, by which time he was well embarked on that disastrous series of events that ended with Mabel Sue's calling him a drunken liar and throwing his typewriter and the carbon of Killers of the Rulers out the third-story window.
* * *
Neologic devices in Killers of the Rulers account for, as in Finnegans Wake, much of its subnarrative power. Present and discuss five such devices. Analyze two of them. Describe how they function as a metaphoric combine of the Blue Aliens.
In his dream, the Old Hack brings his blank essay booklet up to the proctor midway through the three hours. "I can't stand it," he says shakily. "I can't stand it anymore. Just take me away. I'll be good." The proctor stares at him mercilessly through goggles of glittering glass. "Help. Help," the Old Hack whimpers as he tumbles like a stone through various levels of his dream world.
He finds himself awake and fifty-seven in his own bleak room at dawn, his hopes for an assistant instructorship at the college destroyed, the empty pages of Grandsons of the Killers of the Rulers littering the floor beside him, and this novel—his masterpiece, he had told the editor to clinch the contract, the crown of his career—three months overdue today. And counting.
Some Notes On the Lone Wolf
By Barry N. Malzberg
Don Pendleton's Executioner series started as a one-shot idea at Pinnacle Books in 1969. By 1972 George Ernsberger, my editor at Berkley, called it "the phenomenon of the age." Eventually Pendleton wrote 70 of the books himself and the series continues today ghosted by other writers. Mack Bolan's continuing War Against the Mafia (the working title of that first book) had sold wildly from the outset and less than three years later, when Pendleton and Scott Meredith had threatened to take the series from a grim and obdurate Pinnacle, New American Library had offered $250,000 for the next four books in the series. Pendleton stayed at Pinnacle—the publisher faced a lawsuit for misappropriated royalties and essentially had to match the NAL offer to hold on—but the level established by the properties could not fail to have inflamed every mass market paperback publisher in New York.
A few imitative series had been launched by Pinnacle itself—most notably The Butcher whose premise and protagonist were a close if even more sadomasochistic version of Pendleton's Mack Bolan. It was Bolan who had gone out alone to avenge his family incinerated in a Mafia war while Bolan was fighting Commies in Southeast Asia. Dell Books launched The Inquisitor, a series of books on the redemptive odyssey of Simon Quinn (by a then-unknown William Martin Smith, who under a somewhat different name was to become famous in the next decade), Pocket Books and Avon began series the provenance of which is at the moment unrecollected and Ernsberger at Berkley, under some pressure from his publisher, Stephen Conlan, was ready to start his own series.
What he needed in January 1973 was someone who could produce 10 books within less than a year and although my credentials as a Pendleton-imitator were certainly questionable (they were in fact nonexistent), there was no question but that Ernsberger had found one of the few writers close at hand who clearly could produce at that frenetic level. In 1972 I had written nine novels, in 1971 a dozen, in 1970 fourteen; ten books that quickly were not an overwhelming assignment. What he wanted was a series about a law enforcement guy, say maybe an ex-New York City cop, thrown off the force for one or another perceived disgrace, who would declare war upon the drug trade. The cop could be a military veteran with (like Bolan) a good command of ordnance; it wouldn't hurt if he had a black sidekick either still on or just off the force so that they could get some Defiant Ones byplay going in those pre-Eddie Murphy days, and the violence was to be hyped up to Executioner level as the protagonist, after an initial festive in New York, took his mission throughout the States and maybe overseas. Ten novels, $27,500 total advance with (it is this which caught my total attention) 25% of it payable upon signature of the contract. Only a brief outline would be necessary and the tenth book was due to be delivered on or before 10/1/73.
I had never read a Pendleton novel in my life.
Hey, no problem: $6750 for a five-page outline at a time when I perceived my nascent career to be in a recession-induced collapse cleaved away scruple and, for that matter, terror. I read Executioner #7, which struck me as pretty bad, mechanical, and lifeless (like most debased category fiction it depended upon the automatic responses upon the reader, did not create characters and an ambiance of its own), wrote the usual promise-them-a-partridge-in-a-pear-tree outline, signed the contracts and began the series on 1/16/73. The third of the novels was delivered on 2/14/73.
Incontestably I could have delivered the entire series by May (the early plan was for Berkley to bring out the first three novels at once, then publish one a month thereafter) but George Ernsberger asked me to stop after Boston Avenger and wait for further word. There was a problem, it seemed. In the first place, I had given my protagonist, Wulff Conlan, a name uncomfortably close to that of the publisher whose name at the time I had not even known, and in the second place Conlan's victims, unlike Mack Bolan's, were real people with real viewpoints who seemed to undergo real pain when they were killed which was quite frequently. Would this kind of stuff—real pain as opposed to cartoon death that is to say—go in the mass market? Berkley dithered about this while I sulked, wrote a novelization (never published) of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! for Warner Books, and waited around to accept an award for a science fiction novel, which award caused me much difficulty, you bet, in the years to come. (See the letter column of the 2/74 Analog for any further information you want on this.)
Eventually, Ernsberger called—during dinnertime, in fact, on 3/16/73—to say that I could go ahead with the series and would I please change the name of the protagonist? Grumbling, fearing that I might never get back to the center of those novels, I started again and in fact did deliver the tenth book on 10/1/73 after all. (The first three were published in that month.) As is so often the case with imitative series, sales steadily declined from volume #1 which did get close to 70,000) but held above unprofitability through all of those ten, and I was allowed two sequels in 1974 and then two more in conclusion (at a cut advance). I insisted upon killing off Wulff in #14 against the argument of Ernsberger's assistant, Dale Copps, who reminded me of Professor Moriarty.
I signed off on #14: Philadelphia Blowup in 1/75. That means that I am now at a greater distance from these novels than many readers of this anthology are from their birthdates . . . and for that reason my opinion of the series is not necessarily any more valid than would be the opinion of Erika Cornell on her essays in ballet class in the mid-seventies.
The purpose and development of these novels would, in any case, be clear to anyone, even the author. It is evident to me now as it was then that Mack Bolan was insane and Pendleton's novels were a rationalization of vigilantism; it was my intent, then, to show what the real (as opposed to the mass market) enactment of madness and vigilantism might be if death were perceived as something beyond catharsis or an escape route for the bad guys. As the series went on and on and as I became more secure with the voicing and with my apparent ability to circumvent surface and not get fired, Wulff became crazier and crazier. By #13 he was driving crosscountry and killing anyone on suspicion of drug dealing; by #14: Philadelphia Blowup, he was staggering from bar to bar in the City of Brotherly Love and killing everyone because they obviously had to be drug dealers. Finally gunned down for the public safety by his one-time black sidekick, Wulff died far less bloodily than many of his victims while managing a bequest of about $50,000 to his overweight creator. The novels sold overseas intermittently—Denmark stayed around through all 14; the other Scandinavian countries bailed out earlier; the gentle Germans found it all too bloody and sadistic and after editing down the first 10 novels quit on an open-ended contract, paid off and shut it down. I haven't seen anything financially from these since 1979 but entries in various mystery reference sources and the invitation to discuss the series in this anthology suggest that it might have found a particle of an audience. (My real pride in this series, beyond its ambition and sheer, perverse looniness is that I was able to run it through the entirety of its original contract and manage four sequels as well; no Executioner imitator other than those published by Pinnacle went past four or five volumes.) The vicious Rockefeller drug laws ("drug dealers get life imprisonment") were being debated and eventually rammed through the New York State legislature at the time I was writing through the midpoint of the series. It was a propinquity of event which led to some of the more profoundly angry passages in these novels and imputed a certain timelessness as well. (The laws were horseshit and we are still living with their existence and terrible consequence.) Calling a crazy a crazy, no matter how anguished may have been the aspect of the series which was the most admired but for me the work lives in the pure rage of some of the epigraphic statements, notably Kenyatta's. Writing these brought me close to some apprehension of how Malcolm, how H. Rap Brown, how the Soledad Brothers might have felt and how right they were: The Lone Wolf was my own raised fist to a purity and a past already obliterated as they were written, rolled over by the tanks and battery of Bolan's ordnance. (Operating under Bolan's pseudonym: "U.S. Government.") Bolan killed to kill: I think Wulff killed to be free. It all works out the same, of course.
Part II
Authors And Other Culprits
Introduction To Authors And Other Culprits
