NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

by James Yaffe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1956

The second fictional rendition within six months of the crime which rocked and shocked an earlier decade-the Leopold-Loeb case -is less of a documentary than Meyer Levin's Compulsion and in a sense more of a novel. The scene has been shifted from Chicago to New York; the psychological motivation and deviation is neither explored, nor on the other hand, expanded; and with one exception (the eyeglances which identified one of the two boys) the crime is not too closely related to the original circumstances. For Barry Morris, the only child of a forceful woman and a mild doctor, there was the childhood fantasy of a prince and a slave he was finally to live out in his friendship with attractive, arrogant Paul King, the long hoped for son of a rich broker. With Paul, and in order to keep his friendship, he was the reluctant, frightened collaborator in the chain of delinquent acts which led from thefts to vandalism to the kidnapping which for Paul was to be the anodyne for boredom, the test of skill, the proof of power.... The Levin book which is both more burial, more intense, may well have absorbed the available audience.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1956

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown-A.M.F.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1956

Categories: FICTION