Gangster movies and gangster novels are America’s equivalent to Shakespearean tragedy. Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather” is the best known of all old school gangster novels, but others have been long forgotten.
“Little Caesar” by W.R. Burnett
“Little Caesar” is the granddaddy of all old school gangster novels (and gangster movies). Author W.R. Burnett was hardly a gangster himself. He was the scion of a prominent Ohio political family. As a young man he left home for Chicago to be a writer, and checked into a fleabag hotel where he began to meet real-life denizens of the underworld.
This was the 1920s Chicago of Al Capone, whom Burnett’s main character Rico Bandello was based upon.
While the 1931 movie version overshadowed Burnett’s 1929 novel, the book still sizzles and rings true with hard-bitten gangster portrayals that had been toned down for the big screen.
While W.R. Burnett had long been dismissed as a mere pulp novelist, his work lives on in the classic films based on his novels and/or screenplays. Besides “Little Caesar”, these films include “High Sierra”, “The Asphalt Jungle”, “Nobody Lives Forever”, and “The Great Escape” with Steve McQueen.
“Red Harvest” by Dashiell Hammett
Published in 1929, the same year as “Little Caesar”, Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” only spawned one mediocre 1930 film, “Roadhouse Nights.” The film was notable only for a rare glimpse of Jimmy Durante performing with his former vaudeville partners Eddie Jackson and Lou Clayton.
While Hammett wrote the ultimate in crime fiction, including classics such as “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man”, many critics have considered “Red Harvest” to be his best novel, even though it had never achieved the commercial success of the others.
Unlike “The Maltese Falcon’s” Sam Spade and “The Thin Man’s” Nick and Nora Charles, “Red Harvest’s” protagonist is nameless and almost faceless, a detective only known as “The Continental Op.” The Op was based on Hammett’s own life as a young Pinkerton detective, facing off against real crooks and gangsters. (Note that this character also served as the protagonist in many of Hammett’s greatest short stories.)
“Red Harvest” took place in a rough and tumble Montana mining town overrun by union thugs and strikebreaking gangsters. It’s based on Hammett’s real exploits as a Pinkerton in Butte, Montana.
Like all of his crime fiction, the words leap off the page and take the reader to place far beyond the crime fiction genre. It was also among Time Magazine's "All-Time 100 Novels."
“Legs” by William Kennedy
Kennedy’s “Legs” is the first of his Albany, New York trilogy. It’s a fictionalized biography of Jack “Legs” Diamond, a 1920s Albany-born Irish-American gangster. Unlike other gangster novels written long after the fact, Kennedy more than succeeds in bringing the Roaring Twenties, “Legs” Diamond, and his showgirl mistress Kiki Roberts to life.
A weird side note: Kennedy’s office is located in the house where Jack “Legs” Diamond was killed in 1931.
“Tucker’s People” by Ira Wolfert
“Force of Evil”, the classic 1950 noir gangster film starring John Garfield, was based on Ira Wolfert’s long forgotten 1943 gangster novel, “Tucker’s People.” It’s a story about a small-time bookie’s numbers operation in Harlem being taken over by a big-time gangster modeled after real-life twenties killer Dutch Schultz. In this case, both the film and novel were overlooked classics. Some say that it was because John Garfield and Wolfert, a former World War II correspondent in Guadalcanal, were both accused of being Communists at the height of the McCarthy era.
In later years, the film has earned both critical acclaim and cult status, while the novel is still forgotten --- and shouldn’t be.
Sources:
“Imaginative Necessities”, Paul Gray, [January 23, 1983, Time]
“Red Harvest”, Richard Lacayo, [2006, Time]
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