Word: crimed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Compulsion. A terse, tense melodrama based on "the crime of the century," the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case...
...year-old chief petty officer suddenly broke off a casual conversation with a nine-year-old girl, grabbed the child by the throat, choked her and held her under water in a nearby tub until she was dead. Charged with murder, he at first denied the crime with such apparent sincerity that he fooled a lie detector. Later, remorseful, he confessed, but insisted that he could not remember the beginning of the attack, had just "suddenly discovered himself" strangling the girl...
...neat classes: the legally sane, who have an understandable motive such as robbery, and the legally insane, such as the paranoid who kills his imagined persecutor. But now and then there appears a third type -the man who kills without apparent motive, yet appears sane before and after the crime...
Little Serioja is orphaned. His father was killed in the war, his mother teaches school, and she and Serioja live with an aunt. The boy wonders about the mysteries of life, how his heart beats, or why it is almost a crime when a child breaks a dish and only an accident when a grownup does. Sleeping and waking are the tidal rhythms of a child's life. Awake, Serioja tags after older boys to the forest for a piratical, burnt-finger feast of baked potatoes and onions. Asleep, he is sprawled in his bed with an impish...
Anyone who has read Gadfly cannot fail to see the superb butchery done to it in Mr. Ashcraft's review. Perhaps Mr. Ashcraft alone is blind to his literary crime, having somehow forgotten to read Gadfly himself...