Round Trip

Начало книги

BRIEFING: The ‘twenties in America saw the rapid emergence of an entirely new form of criminal: the gangster. These ruthless villains, who ruled by the machine-gun, took a stranglehold on vice, gambling and bootlegging in the biggest cities of the USA. The most notorious was undoubtedly Al Capone, nicknamed ‘Scarface’, who graduated from petty crime to controlling all the rackets in Chicago, with most of the local police and politicians on his payroll. His ruthless disposal of enemies and rebel gangsters was legendary. In Britain, the only real rivals to Capone were the Kray twins, Reginald and Ronald, whose ‘firm’ ran the London underworld in the ‘sixties with a similar mixture of threats, violence and murder.

AUTHOR: William Riley Burnett (1899–1981), an unpublished Idaho novelist and playwright before he moved to Chicago in the late ‘twenties and there found his true metier, is the man credited with immortalising the gangster in fiction. His novel, ‘Little Caesar’, published in 1929, is today regarded as the book which typifies the whole genre. A remarkable chronicle of the rise and fall of a tough Chicago gangster, Cesare Bandello, known as Rico, it was the first naturalistic crime novel as well as being the first piece of fiction about the power of the criminal underworld. Based on Burnett’s acute observation of Chicago’s gangsters and racketeers, it was an instant publishing sensation-selling half a million copies-and made the author a household name. ‘Little Caesar’ similarly revolutionised the movies when it was adapted for the screen in 1930, establishing Edward G. Robinson as a major Hollywood star. It set the benchmark against which all the subsequent gangster pictures have been judged, right up to and including ‘The Godfather’ (1972) and its sequels.

Читать дальше →