It is a wintry November Sunday in Kenwood, and Paul Durica is wearing a brown knit cap, a well-worn pair of good black shoes, dark gray jeans, and a long double-breasted herringbone tweed coat from whose bottom hem a few stray threads can be seen to escape. The coat has an elegant shape and hangs beautifully, emphasizing the lanky frame of its wearer, but its right belt loop—Durica does not wear a belt—is hanging loose, one of its eight buttons is missing, and another remains unfastened. The almost chin-length sideburns that make their way down Durica’s handsomely bony face are dark and reddish, streaked by several graying hairs. He steps from shoe to shoe and rubs his hands together as he speaks.

In totality, his appearance lends Paul Durica a somewhat professorial air that is at once reinforced by his occupation (English PhD student) and the subject of his discourse (history), and belied by the marvelously unsavory nature of the precise event he is conducting. Durica is the sole proprietor of the recently founded Pocket Guide to Hell Tours, and on this day he is leading a small mob of deeply interested people on a 90-minute walking tour of the architectural sites associated with the planning, execution, and aftermath of the brutal 1924 murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks by two teenage University of Chicago students: Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard A. Loeb.

Two of the deeply interested people hanging on Durica’s every word happen to be me and Ross. The tour is—let me be frank—extraordinarily entertaining. Durica speaks without notes, but with his hands (despite the fact that they turn ever more red with cold each time he removes his gloves so he can gesture more theatrically). He inhabits the skin of his characters like a true obsessive (but analyzes their behavior like a literary theorist). And he perfectly paces the revelation of each bizarre detail: the strange substance the police found on Bobby’s naked body, the typewritten ransom note whose text was stolen from the pages of a detective novel, the chisel thrown out of the window of a moving car.

Apart from anything else, Durica is having fun. His voice, always rich with pleasure in his tale, often rounds with laughter—and his delight legitimizes our own. We are, the lot of us, like children at a campsite fire, leaning forward to catch the darkest detail of the horror story we aren’t supposed to hear. I am reminded of how I used to feel when I read Agatha Christie novels back to back at the age of thirteen, shivery and captivated and thrilled by the meticulous imagination of the murderous mind.

Paul Durica says he is planning at least three other tours on different topics, slated to appear in the spring and summer months of 2009: none of them, he promises, will rise above the seedy underbelly of Chicago’s history.

Did you say you yet needed another reason to come and see me soon here in this city? Now you have one.