Ask the Author: David L. Carlson
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David L. Carlson
We were sitting at breakfast in a little diner when my friend Charlie started telling me about his father, Matt Rizzo. My eggs grew cold on the plate as I listened to him tell his father’s tale of blindness, prison, the Crime of the Century and somehow, the great poets of Western Civilization. In Chicago, Leopold and Loeb are still the legendary thrill-killers that committed their heinous crime in 1924. And the Chicago mob continues to make headlines today. I wanted to know more.
Charlie and I spent about 6 months going over the details of Matt’s life. I read Matt’s writings and Leopold’s autobiography. I listened to audio recordings of Matt that Charlie had kept. I spent many hours at the Chicago History Museum and the archives at the Northwestern University Library in Evanston, IL. The Leopold Loeb story is one of the most documented murders in history.
The further I got into the material, the harder it became to think about how to tell this story. There were so many fascinating ways to dig in to the material. I had the good fortune to spend time with an amazing story guru, Bobette Buster, who helped me work through the structure of the complicated real-life relationships. In the end, certain scenes and dialogs had to be imagined, based on the best available information. And while those parts of the story are a product of the imagination, I would argue as the poet John Keats did for the “truth of imagination”.
Ever since the Enlightenment, the western world has increasingly relied on ratiocination as the best (and perhaps only) way to navigate the world we live in. Arts and music are the first things cut in education budgets. Efficiency is King. And yet the imagination is as authentic as any fact we can describe. This story is an effort to revive the magic and wonder of the human experience, if only for a few hundred pages.
Charlie and I spent about 6 months going over the details of Matt’s life. I read Matt’s writings and Leopold’s autobiography. I listened to audio recordings of Matt that Charlie had kept. I spent many hours at the Chicago History Museum and the archives at the Northwestern University Library in Evanston, IL. The Leopold Loeb story is one of the most documented murders in history.
The further I got into the material, the harder it became to think about how to tell this story. There were so many fascinating ways to dig in to the material. I had the good fortune to spend time with an amazing story guru, Bobette Buster, who helped me work through the structure of the complicated real-life relationships. In the end, certain scenes and dialogs had to be imagined, based on the best available information. And while those parts of the story are a product of the imagination, I would argue as the poet John Keats did for the “truth of imagination”.
Ever since the Enlightenment, the western world has increasingly relied on ratiocination as the best (and perhaps only) way to navigate the world we live in. Arts and music are the first things cut in education budgets. Efficiency is King. And yet the imagination is as authentic as any fact we can describe. This story is an effort to revive the magic and wonder of the human experience, if only for a few hundred pages.
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