Edgar Allan Poe is not the only one turning 200 in 2009! Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born in 1809 and on the same day, February 12.
The website for The Darwin Day Celebration, an international event, sums up their contribution to the world as we know it today quite succinctly: “Lincoln freed American slaves from physical servitude while Darwin freed the human mind from the bonds of supernatural dogma. The positive influences of their legacies are as relevant in the world today as they were in the 1800s.”
The inclusion of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the science curriculum is still under fire in many places and in some cases attitudes and beliefs have not changed much since the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial.
Ona Russell has written a recent historical mystery set at that trial, The Natural Selection, which incorporates all of the key figures, including H.L. Mencken, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow, as well as actual courtroom excerpts.
Her protagonist, Sarah Kaufman, is a Jewish probate court official in Toledo, Ohio. She heads south to visit with her cousin and ends up in Dayton, Tennessee -- where the trial is underway -- working with Mencken to solve the murder of the cousin’s colleague, an enigmatic college professor who has left behind a cryptic Darwinian message for them.
Do not mistake this is for a cozy mystery. Sarah’s search for the truth is a harrowing one as she encounters bigotry and brutality and exhausts her physical strength and psychological reserves in the process.
Clarence Darrow has also been featured lately in a true crime narrative, For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz.
Later the basis of the Hitchcock film Rope, in 1924 it was a crime that shocked the nation -- the brutal killing in Chicago of a child by two wealthy college students solely for the thrill of the experience.
After Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were arrested for the crime, their families hired Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America, to defend their sons.
Darrow aimed to save Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty by showing that the crime was the inevitable consequence of sexual and psychological abuse that the defendants had suffered during childhood. But they had left a crucial piece of evidence at the scene of the crime and eventually confessed to the murder. Darrow had the men plead guilty to avoid a trial
Darrow’s adversary, the prosecuting attorney Robert Crowe, had ambitions of becoming Chicago's next mayor and was determined to see them hang.
Both sides trotted out numerous psychiatrists to testify whether or not Leopold and Loeb were indeed mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences for the pair. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936 and Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958.
Kirkus called Baatz’s book “A solid true-crime thriller that’s also a masterly analysis of postwar shifts in society’s ideas about crime and personality.”
For the Thrill of It was included on the 2008 Edgar Nominees List in the Best Fact Crime category.
Darrow also provided some remarkable fictional courtroom drama Caleb Carr’s 1997 thriller, The Angel of Darkness. Another mystery best to not mistake for a cozy.
