W. R. Burnett

• Born: November 25, 1899
• Birthplace: Springfield, Ohio
• Died: April 25, 1982
• Place of death: Santa Monica, California

Types of Plot: Inverted; hard-boiled; police procedural

Contribution

W. R. Burnett was a prolific novelist and screenwriter. His most popular and enduring work was in the area of crime fiction, a subgroup within the mystery and detective genre. Burnett helped to shape and refine the conventions of the hard-boiled crime novel—a type of fiction that seems particularly suited to dramatizing the garish and violent urban world of the twentieth century. His novels and films are rich with underworld characters, scenes, and dialogue that would become the stock-in-trade of other writers; in the popular imagination, his work was a revelation of how mobsters and modern outlaws thought, acted, and spoke in the urban jungle.

Burnett knew gangsters, did extensive research on some of them, and made a close study of crime’s causes and effects. He sought in his works to present the criminal outlook and criminal activity in a direct and dramatic fashion, without explicit authorial comment or judgment. He believed that crime is an inevitable part of society, given human frailties and desires, and that it must be seen in its own terms to be understood. This belief explains the shock caused by many of his novels on first publication and his occasional difficulties with film censors. Burnett’s crime stories, then, are characterized by a sense of objectivity, authenticity, and revelation. They realistically convey the glittery surface and shadowy depths of American society.

Biography

William Riley Burnett was born in Springfield, Ohio, on November 25, 1899, of old American stock. He attended grammar schools in Springfield and Dayton, high school in Columbus, and preparatory school in Germantown, Ohio. He was an adequate student and an avid athlete. In 1919, he enrolled in the college of journalism at Ohio State University but stayed for only one semester. In 1920, he married Marjorie Louise Bartow; they were divorced in the early 1940’s. In 1943, he married Whitney Forbes Johnstone; they had two sons.

From 1920 to 1927, Burnett worked in an office as a statistician for the Bureau of Labor Statistics; he hated office work but hung on while he tried tirelessly, but fruitlessly, to establish himself as a writer. Frustrated with his situation, he left Ohio for Chicago in 1927, taking a job as a night clerk in a seedy hotel. Bootlegging, prostitution, violence, and corruption were rampant at the time. Rival gangs indiscriminately carried out their territorial wars with tommy guns and explosives. Al Capone was king. The impact on Burnett’s imagination was profound. Gradually, he came to know and understand the city and found in it the material and outlook he needed to become a successful writer.

Little Caesar (1929), Burnett’s first published novel, quickly became a best seller. The film rights were purchased by Warner Bros., and the film version, which appeared in 1931, was a sensational success. In 1930, Burnett went west to California and worked as a screenwriter to subsidize his literary endeavors. He remained in California for the rest of his life.

Burnett had a long, productive, and financially rewarding career in films. He worked with some of Hollywood’s best writers, directors, and actors. He also wrote scripts for a number of popular television series in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Nevertheless, he was first and foremost a writer of fiction, producing more than thirty novels and several shorter works during a career that spanned five decades.

Burnett wrote many novels outside the mystery and detective genre, stories dealing with a wide variety of subjects—boxing, dog racing, political campaigns, fascism in the 1930’s, eighteenth century Ireland, the modern West Indies, the American frontier, and others. His strength, however, was as a writer of crime fiction; on this his reputation rests securely. In 1980, he was honored by the Mystery Writers of America with the Grand Masters Award. He died in California on April 25, 1982.

Analysis

In the introduction to the 1958 American reprint of Little Caesar, W. R. Burnett describes the elements out of which he created this career-launching novel. He recalls his arrival in Chicago and describes how the noise, pace, color, violence, and moral anarchy of the city shocked and stimulated him. He went everywhere, taking notes and absorbing the urban atmosphere that he would later use as a background. A scholarly work on a particular Chicago gang (not Capone’s) gave him a basic plotline, the idea of chronicling the rise and fall of an ambitious mobster. From a hoodlum acquaintance, he derived a point of view from which to narrate the story—not the morally outraged view of law-abiding society, as was usually the case in crime stories of the time, but rather the hard-boiled, utterly pragmatic view of the criminal.

These were the essential ingredients on which Burnett’s genius acted as a catalyst. These ingredients can be found in all of his crime fiction: the menacing atmosphere of the modern city, where human predators and prey enact an age-old drama; the extensive knowledge of the underworld and its denizens; the grandiose plans undone by a quirk of fate; the detached tone that suggests a full acceptance of human vice and frailty without overlooking instances of moral struggle and resistance; the sense that criminals are not grotesques or monsters but human beings who respond to the demands of their environment with ruthless practicality; and the colloquial style. Some of the novels focus on the career of a single criminal, while others are more comprehensive in their treatment of crime and society.

Little Caesar

Little Caesar is the story of Cesare “Rico” Bandello, a “gutter Macbeth” as Burnett once referred to him in an interview. Rico comes to Chicago, joins one of the bigger gangs involved in the various lucrative criminal enterprises of the period, and eventually takes over as leader by means of his single-minded ferocity and cleverness. Everything Rico does is directed toward the aggrandizement of his power, influence, and prestige. He has few diversions, distractions, or vices—even the usual ones of mobsters. As he goes from success to success over the bodies of those who get in his way, he aspires to ever-greater glory, until fate intervenes, sending him away from Chicago and into hiding, where eventually he stops a police officer’s bullet.

Rico is a simple but understandable individual: ambitious, austere, deadly. To some degree, the exigencies and opportunities of jazz-age Chicago made such men inevitable, as Burnett clearly suggests in the book. Rico’s story is presented dramatically, in vivid scenes filled with crisp dialogue and the argot of mean streets; this mode of presentation conveys a powerful sense of immediacy, authenticity, and topicality. Just as powerful is the archetypal quality of Burnett’s portrait of Rico, who emerges as the epitome of the underworld overachiever. This combination of the topical and the archetypal was extremely potent; it accounts for the fact that Little Caesar greatly influenced subsequent portrayals of gangsters in the United States.

Organized Crime

Burnett was interested not only in the character and exploits of individuals who chose a life of crime but also in criminal organizations that increasingly were seen to corrupt the American political and legal establishments, especially after the end of World War II. The most extended exploration of this subject is found in his trilogy comprising The Asphalt Jungle (1949), Little Men, Big World (1951), and Vanity Row (1952). These novels dramatize gangland operations and the progressive corruption of a city political administration.

It is important to note that the Kefauver Senate hearings on organized crime in the early 1950’s, which were omnipresent in newspapers, magazines, and on television, made these stories seem particularly timely and authentic. Burnett, however, did not claim to have inside knowledge about a vast, highly organized and hierarchical crime network controlled by the Mafia and linked to Sicily. His underworld is more broadly based and is peopled by many ethnic types as well as by native Americans. In other words, Burnett recognized that crime is rooted in human nature and aspirations and that it should not be attributed—as it often was in the wake of the hearings—to ethnic aberration or foreign conspiracy. The epigraph, taken from the writing of William James, that prefaces The Asphalt Jungle makes this point about human nature: “MAN, biologically considered . . . is the most formidable of all beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species.”

The Asphalt Jungle

The setting of The Asphalt Jungle as well as Little Men, Big World and Vanity Row is a midsized, midwestern city that is physically and morally disintegrating. In The Asphalt Jungle, a new police commissioner is appointed to brighten the tarnished image of the city police force to improve the current administration’s chances for reelection. The move is completely cynical on the part of the administration brass, yet the new commissioner does his best against strong resistance and bureaucratic inertia. Paralleling the commissioner’s agonizingly difficult cleanup campaign is the planning and execution of a million-dollar jewelry heist by a team of criminal specialists, who are backed financially by a prominent and influential lawyer. The narrative movement between police activity and criminal activity serves to heighten suspense and to comment on the difficulty of any concerted human effort in an entropic universe.

In The Asphalt Jungle, there is a genuine, if somewhat ineffectual attempt to deal with serious crime and official corruption within the city. The moral landscape may contain large areas of gray; there may be disturbing parallels and connections between police and criminal organizations. By and large, however, one can tell the guardians from the predators.

Little Men, Big World

In Little Men, Big World, there are several key political people involved with local crime figures, and a symbiotic relationship of some sort between political machines and organized crime seems inevitable. Thus, at the end of the story, a corrupt judge explains to a friend that in politics, “success breeds corruption.” One needs money to get and keep power. When legitimate sources of revenue are exhausted, it is natural to look to those who need protection to stay in business—gambling-house proprietors, bookies, panderers, and the like. In this novel, the city has reached what Burnett calls a state of imbalance. Not only is official corruption extensive and debilitating, but its exposure occurs purely by chance as well. Any housecleaning that results is superficial.

Vanity Row

In Vanity Row, the political machine is so riddled with corruption that the highest people in the administration are themselves directly involved with criminal activity—illegal wiretaps, conspiracy, perjury, frame-ups—as they attempt by any means to retain power in a morally chaotic environment. When the story opens, a top administration official is found murdered. He was the mediator between the administration and the Chicago syndicate in a dispute over the cost of allowing local distribution of the wire service, a service that was necessary to the illegal offtrack betting industry.

The mayor and his associates assume that their friend was killed by the Mob as a warning to lower the price. In response, they order their “special investigator” in the police force to muddy the waters and make sure that the connection between the dead man, themselves, and the syndicate is not discovered by the police. Burnett implies that there is nothing to keep the predators in check. The only hope for the city is that eventually the administration will succumb to its own nihilistic, anarchic impulses and make way for a reform group so the cycle can begin anew.

In each of these novels, the story is timely, the presentation is objective or dramatic, the language is colloquial, and the tempo is fast paced. In them, Burnett moved beyond a concern with individual criminals to explore the world of criminal organizations and corrupt political administrations.

Goodbye, Chicago

In his last published novel, Goodbye, Chicago: 1928, End of an Era (1981), Burnett deals with the imminent collapse, through internal rot, of an entire society. The novel focuses on the Capone syndicate, the archetypal American crime organization, and on a small group of dedicated Chicago police officers attempting to deal with crime and corruption on an almost apocalyptic scale.

The story begins with a woman’s body being fished from the river by crew members on a city fireboat. As in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-1866), which opens with the discovery of a body floating in the Thames, the investigation of this death reveals a web of corruption connecting all levels of society and both sides of the law. Of all Burnett’s novels, this one best shows the devastating effects of the interaction and interdependency of American legal and criminal organizations in the twentieth century.

The story is not divided into chapters or parts; instead, it unfolds in brief scenes whose juxtaposition is by turns ironic, suspenseful, comic, or grotesque. This cinematic technique of quick crosscutting seems particularly appropriate to a story revealing strange and unexpected connections among people and dramatizing their frantic, self-destructive activity in the final months before the onset of the Great Depression.

High Sierra

In his crime fiction, Burnett wrote about a gritty underworld that he knew well, a world of professional thieves, killers, thugs, mugs, con men, crime czars, and corrupt officials. Thus, his crime stories remain convincing even decades after their publication. If Burnett were merely convincing, however, his books would have little more than historical interest. He is also a skilled novelist. There is, as film director John Huston once remarked, a powerful sense of inevitability about Burnett’s stories. Character, situation, and destiny are thoroughly intertwined and appropriate. Consider for example, the fate of Roy Earle, the protagonist of High Sierra (1940).

Roy Earle, a proud and solitary figure, is a legendary gunman and former member of the Dillinger gang of bank robbers. At the beginning of the story, he is released from prison and drives west through the American desert toward what he hopes will be an oasis—an exclusive California hotel with a fortune in money and jewels protected by a temptingly vulnerable security system. The robbery itself is well planned and executed. Nevertheless, as always with Burnett’s fiction, things go awry, and the promise of wealth proves maddeningly illusory. Finally, in another wasteland—which ironically completes the deadly circle begun in the opening sequence—Roy makes a defiant and heroic last stand among the cold, high peaks of the Sierras. Thus, characterization, imagery, and structure are remarkably integrated in this Depression-era story of a futile quest for fulfillment in a hostile environment.

Powerful Scenes and Characters

Burnett’s novels are packed with powerful scenes and tableaux of underworld activity and characters that became part of the iconography of crime writing: the would-be informant gunned down on church steps; funerals of dead mobsters who are “sent off” with floral and verbal tributes from their killers; the ambitious mobster making an unrefusable offer to a “business” rival; the ingenious sting operation; the caper executed with clockwork precision; the car-bomb assassination; and many more. Many of the images one associates with crime fiction and film have their first or most memorable expression in Burnett’s works.

The novels contain a gallery of memorable characters; even minor characters are sketched with a Dickensian eye for the idiosyncratic and incongruous. The following, for example, is the introduction to police investigator Emmett Lackey, a minor figure in Vanity Row:

Lackey was a huge man of about forty. He was not only excessively tall, six five or more, but also very wide and bulky, weighing just under three hundred pounds. And yet, in spite of his size, there was nothing formidable about him. He looked soft, slack, and weak. Small, evasive blue eyes peered out nervously at the world from behind oldfashioned, gold-rimmed glasses. His complexion was very fair, pink and white, and had an almost babyish look to it. His manner was conciliatory in the extreme and he always seemed to be trying to appease somebody. . . .

But behind Lackey’s weak smiles were strong emotions.

The brief sketch captures a recurring theme in all Burnett’s crime stories—the use of masks to hide a vulnerable or corrupt reality. Many of Burnett’s characters are obsessively secretive, especially the more powerful ones, who are happy to work in the background and manipulate those onstage, who take greater risks for far less gain.

Burnett has a wonderful ear for dialogue and authentic American speech, which partly explains the fact that so many of his novels were successfully adapted to film. For example, two crime reporters are talking about a voluptuous murder suspect in Vanity Row: According to the first, “That picture . . . It didn’t do her justice.” The second responds, “A picture? How could it? . . . It would take a relief map.” The brassy, earthy language his characters use always seems natural to their personality, place, and calling.

Burnett’s crime novels are believable, energetic, and literate. As some dramatists of William Shakespeare’s time used the melodramatic conventions of the revenge play to explore the spiritual dislocations of their age, so Burnett used the conventions of crime fiction to explore dark undercurrents—urban decay, the symbiosis between criminal and legal institutions, the prevalence of masks in a hypocritical society, the elusiveness of truth and success in a mysterious world. In other words, there is a considerable amount of substance in Burnett’s fiction, which explains their translation into more than twelve languages and constant reprintings. They are important and enduring portraits of life and death in the urban jungle.

Bibliography

Faragoh, Francis Edward. Little Caesar: Screenplay. Special ed. Eye, Suffolk, England: ScreenPress Books, 2001. Special, updated edition of the screenplay adaptation of Burnett’s novel that brought him lasting fame.

Horsley, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Scholarly treatise on the thriller genre discussing five of Burnett’s novels, from Little Caesar to Underdog. Bibliography and index.

Madden, David, ed. Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Collection of scholarly essays about the hard-boiled subgenre and its practitioners; provides insight into Burnett’s works.

Mate, Ken, and Pat McGilligan. “Burnett: An Interview.” Film Comment 19 (January/February, 1983): 59-68. Interview with Burnett focusing on his many years in Hollywood and his experiences with the studios over four decades.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Places Burnett’s work in the context of the other writers of hard-boiled detective fiction and helps chart the changes in his work over time as a function of the changes in the wider subgenre.

Seldes, Gilbert. Foreword to Little Caesar. New York: Dial Press, 1958. Foreword to Burnett’s first detective novel by the editor of The Dial, discussing Burnett and his work’s importance to the genre.