On its surface, the newest Leopold-Loeb adaptation, Jazzed, by Jill Dearman may seem like just another retelling of the well-known story, albeit with a genderbent twist. The reader follows Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Raab, a beautiful, crime-obsessed, moody, vivacious girl and her relationship with the dark, brooding, sexually passionate Wilhelmina ‘Will’ Reinhardt. Most of the usual beats are there: the pair meet, commit petty crimes, are walked in on in a compromising situation, avoid each other, get back together, kill a 14-year-old, get caught, are tried and sentenced to Life and 99 years in prison. Many quotes are taken from 1924 newspapers, Nathan Leopold’s autobiography and, interestingly enough, many scenes, quotes and characters are borrowed from the Compulsion book and movie as well. But Jazzed isn’t content with merely copying what came before-it adds several new angles to explore.
Before I go further, I want to be clear that I will be discussing the entire book, so if you’d rather read it with no spoilers, it’s available to preorder through Amazon here, and will be published on July 5th. I also want to thank Vine Leaves Press for providing me with a free review copy. Now, into Jazzed.
The title itself is a reference to one of these new angles: jazz and music are integral pieces of this story. Will and Dolly are both musical prodigies, Will with the clarinet and Dolly with the piano, and at their first meeting they play together. Seeing in each other a kindred spirit as they improvise, the author describes that “their notes could find each other in the ether and dance together.” Leopold and Loeb could both play instruments and Loeb apparently enjoyed singing (despite having no talent for it), but Will and Dolly both breathe music. It’s their connection, their sense of difference from the rest of the world, and even represents their chance to escape and start a new, more authentic life together, as they are both offered the chance to go to Europe in the summer to study in a conservatory. And of course, you can’t discuss jazz without bringing in the people who invented it, which brings up the next new topic this book tackles: race.
Despite being a crime perpetuated by Jewish criminals in a very antisemitic time, race, racism and prejudice rarely enter into Leopold-Loeb adaptations. Dearman changes that: showcasing racial tension within the Raab home, as Dolly’s Irish-Catholic mother supports eugenics and restricting immigration. As Dolly and Will branch outside of their conservative homes, they find themselves side by side with African Americans in jazz clubs, dancing and creating music. This gives the sheltered girls the perspective to see that race does not make anyone lesser or more superior, all are just humans trying to find their ways to happiness.
The most obvious new twist is the gender one: if Leopold and Loeb had been women, how would their story have played out differently? The book hits hard on this in the very first scene, in which Will is assaulted by an old man in a movie theatre:
“Will held her breath as the old man lifted his folded-up coat from his lap and placed it purposefully over his left arm. Now, she no longer saw his hand but could feel its reptilian chill on her knee through the lightweight wool of her dress. The creeping nausea in the pit of her stomach alerted her, second by second, to the sensation of his meaty fingers slithering down toward her hemline. This is why girls should wear pants!”
She is able to deescalate the situation with a borrowed fan from her sister, but this perspective is entirely new to the narrative: in past adaptations if there was assault it was either related to Leopold’s governess when he was young, or, as teens, it was Leopold and Loeb doing the assaulting.
Both Will and Dolly have had bad experiences of this kind with men, Dolly having a pregnancy scare in her early teens, possibly a parallel to Loeb contracting gonorrhea. They’re vulnerable to the attentions and attacks by men, that is until they find a more accepting community.
Typically, Leopold and Loeb exit in a vacuum and never interact with other queer people. Not so in Jazzed. Dolly and Will find their way to the jazz clubs in Harlem, where all of the new themes converge. The couple visit many jazz clubs and parties which allow same-sex couples to dance and show affection openly, and they feel much more at home in these musically charged, accepting places than in the antiseptic, rule-bound, white worlds they inhabit by day. Will also confronts her queerness and relationship to gender more than Leopold and Loeb apparently ever did: cross-dressing and musing often on how she’d like to act less stereotypically feminine, and take on more masculine roles.
These various themes push and pull the character as they flow through the typical beats of the Leopold-Loeb plot, until they are brought to the forefront during the sentencing hearing. Because of their experiences, the girls had a very different motive for their crime than their male counterparts, asking their lawyer: “how can the State jump to the conclusion so easily that we are the face of evil because we killed a while male when the State, and society as a whole, even our own families, are convinced that the life of a Black woman, her Black child, and the lives of two so-called ‘inverts’ such as ourselves have less value?”
Yet, because they are women, their lawyer doesn’t listen to their motive, instead inviting psychiatrists to the stand who theorize that women aren’t meant to go to college, that doing so causes the womb to atrophy and sterilization and lesbianism to occur. Their lawyer argues that they are hysterical females who must be protected from themselves. Even with quotes taken word for word from the lawyers, psychiatrists and judge during the Leopold-Loeb hearing, Dearman reframes them as men taking away the girl’s agency and using their case to further a sexist narrative.
The new themes come full force in the book’s end, which completely diverges from the Leopold-Loeb story. Both Dolly and Will are sterilized, and Dolly becomes a guinea pig for medical experiments in a mental hospital, by doctors who attempt to cure her of her same-sex attraction. Eventually she is lobotomized and loses her ability to play music completely. Will is eventually released, though she has trouble letting go of her regret and the loss of Dolly. With the help of a gay friend from her college days, she does eventually begin to reintegrate into the gay community of New York in 1969 soon after the Stonewall riots. Once again, the queer community accepts her completely, when a young black woman recognizes Will in a gay bar, she’s quick to assure her that her past doesn’t matter: “I’m you and you’re me. We’re all one here. Not just here in this room, but everywhere. We’re all just energy responding to the vibration of the music, of the universe.”
While many of the story beats and character traits are what you’d expect to find in other fictional Leopold-Loeb fare, these new twists allow for a playfulness about the story, a recontextualization of known facts to arrive at different conclusions.
The Lives and Legends of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold 