W. R. Burnett (1899–1982)

This book is massive. 1100 pages, hardbound. This is the kind of book you want to use to wallop burglars. That'd be an especially appropriate use of this anthology, too, since it covers a full range of 1920s crime novels. Overall, it's a fascinating read. You get the first books of several major detective series, like Charlie Chan and Ellery Queen. Even the book with an almost unbearable protagonist, Philo Vance, gave me oodles of useful research notes and an interesting mystery as the show more backbone of the piece. Dashiell Hammet's first book is a veritable blood bath, but a masterfully done one at that. Reading Little Caesar, I can well understand how this established the gangster novel--and movie--genres.

There is a lengthy introduction at the start, giving context for each book. The annotations throughout were very useful (indeed, for the gangster novel Little Caesar, the lingo would've been a challenge to parse otherwise) but I also found myself wanting more annotations.

If you love classic mysteries and want a showcase book, this is worth the hefty price. (I bought my signed edition from Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.) But do be aware it is a difficult read because of the sheer size of the book. Not only is this book impossible to tuck away in a purse to read on the go, it's awkward to read wherever you may be. Still, I found the challenge to be more than worthwhile in the end.

My reviews for each included book are found below, and are also posted under the individual book listings on Goodreads and LibraryThing.

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The House Without a Key: Charlie Chan #1 by by Earl Derr Biggers

Charlie Chan is an iconic character, and it was interesting to see him within the context of his first novel, published with its original text. The book surprised me in many ways. First of all, the settings within the book are masterfully portrayed. I've never seen a book so vividly describe Hawaii in the 1920s. The annotations remarked a few times on inaccuracies or fictionalized bits, but many of the details felt spot-on (I say that, having extensively read on early 20th century Hawaii for my own novel). While I expected issues with racism and caricatures because of the era, this was not as bad as I expected it would be (how's that for an endorsement?). Charlie Chan is regarded as something of a mockery now, but as the notes observed, he does not speak pidgin Chinese, but talks as a very highly educated man. The text of the book demonstrated that well. The way white characters reacted to Chan felt realistic (though sad), but I also understood well why the original text had Chan racist against the Japanese. Within the context of the time, that made perfect sense; it's worth noting that these racist snippets were toned down or removed in later editions of the book.

This does not develop as a modern murder mystery does--often with a corpse in chapter one. Instead, the start is slow as the reader gets to know the Winterslip family of both Boston and Honolulu. The dead body doesn't show up until almost a hundred pages in, with Charlie Chan's arrival immediately after. I think my biggest surprise about the book was that Chan was a minor character with a pivotal role. Instead, most of the novel followed the stuffy scion of the Winterslip family. His was not a bad perspective--it was enjoyable to watch him grow across the book--but I expected a Charlie Chan book to, well, be more about Charlie Chan. The murderer was fairly obvious to be from early on, though there were some nice twists and turns leading up to the big reveal at the end.

I feel no urge to read onward in the series, but if I need to do more research on 1920s Hawaii, I just might. The book was not a bad read at all. Intriguing, I'd say.

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The Benson Murder Case (Philo Vance #1)
by S.S. Van Dine

I must say, the first chapter of this book convinced me that it was going to be absolutely dreadful. It probably didn't help that preceding information in the book had pointed out that the Philo Vance series eventually withered and died because the insufferable, rambling nature of the lead character became too aggravating to bear. But once I made it past that initial introductory chapter and to the actual murder, the story was much more engaging.

The positives: It's a good murder mystery. The set-up is complex and intriguing, and it nicely utilizes New York City. Alvin Benson is found dead, shot in the head, and the clues in his house are myriad, from the handbag and gloves left on the mantle to the car parked out front during the night. The district attorney invites his friend Philo Vance to see the crime, and on a whim, the insufferable art collector digs into the mystery, and digs in deep. The way Philo Vance psychologically examines people is fascinating. I liked that I guessed the murderer quite early on.

The negatives: Philo Vance. He's aggravating. He boasts throughout that he's known who the murderer is from the time he first viewed the corpse at the crime scene, but he strings along his DA friend for days, relentlessly teasing him and shredding apart his reliance on circumstantial evidence. While the latter is necessary (the DA was ready to convict several people on tenuous evidence), the whole know-it-all aspect gets old really fast.

The choice of narrator felt utterly useless, too. Another of Vance's friends is the observer of everything, and he contributes nothing to the story. He's no Watson, there to offer occasional advice or act as a foil or do medical examinations. No, this guy is just there, a shadow. I can't even remember his name; it only came up at the very beginning, I think.

The annotations probably helped my reading experience a lot, too, providing translations or context for the French and Latin Vance often employs, explaining Vance's commentary on art, and noting what NYC locations were real and fictional. Interestingly, the author muddled a lot of period details himself. By the calendar within the book, the murder should be set in 1918, but various details on geographical locations or police technology didn't exist until the early 1920s. Writers these days can check those kinds of things through Google...

I wouldn't read onward in this series, I think, because the very idea of Philo Vance becoming even more annoying is a big turn off. That said, this book offered me a tremendous boon in terms of research, with fantastic period details and cultural references.

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The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen

Thus far in this collection, I've read the first books about Charlie Chan and Philo Vance. Both had issues, from my modern perspective--a painfully slow start and barely any Charlie Chan in the first, and the rambling, annoying presence of Philo Vance in the second. But in this, the first Ellery Queen novel, I finally encountered a 1920s mystery I absolutely loved. The writing is fantastic from page one, the mystery utterly intriguing, and the cast of characters diverse and amusing. I could see myself reading and enjoying more Ellery Queen novels.

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Red Harvest (The Continental Op #1) by Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest is aptly named, a bloodbath of a 1920s noir novel. When the unnamed private detective rolls into Personville to meet a new client, the client is found murdered. The Op goes about solving that murder, and becomes embroiled in pretty intense gang warfare that gets far nastier after the original murder is solved. This is a fast read, with knife-sharp language and wit. The Op is a character with virtually no background or personality, but he has a brutal edge and a will to survive. It's no wonder this character helped to establish the very trope of the hard-boiled PI, complete with steady applications of scotch.

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Little Caesar by W.R. Burnett

Little Caesar is the first major gangster novel, published in 1929. It was made into a famous 1931 movie--and essentially created the gangster stereotype (one I became most familiar with through Bugs Bunny cartoons). The book itself is an interesting study on the 'voice' of a book, as the author goes deep into gangster lingo. At the end of my edition, the editor included a foreword that the author wrote in the 1950s about the writing and rejection process behind the book. He made a conscious choice to strip away adjectives to make the prose bloody and blunt. It works. The book doesn't try to make you like its characters--it just shows them as they are. I was grateful to have the annotations to help me parse the lingo and explain details about Chicago and guns of the period.

I never would have expected to like the book this much, but it fascinated me. It shows the era with all its ugliness and racism and dames and plates of spaghetti with wine. Now I want to watch the movie to compare.

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This is a great pairing of a couple of classic noir stories by W. R. Burnett. I'll review each separately but note some of the commonalities. Burnett's characters run the stories. And the characters are iconic. Both stories are worthy of their status.

High Sierra

Anybody who is interested in the book, but hasn't read it, has probably seen the movie. I had. I don’t think movies typically spoil books — the books give you a chance to live the story much more thoroughly and engage with it for show more a much longer time.

This is a seriously hard noir story. I won’t say it’s unforgiving, because the good ones never really are. There’s a touch of humanity, and even sensitivity, to the story that helps to make it relatable and engaging.

The story is tightly focused on Roy Earle. Earle is a recently pardoned lifetime criminal, once a member of John Dillinger’s band. Like Doc Riemenschneider in Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle, he’s looking for a big payoff to close out his career. Earle wants to “go East,” and live on the payoff.

Earle is accomplished. And feared. He’s got the hardness that a lot of noir authors try to convey in a character and not as many pull off. Burnett does. You can feel the chill off the page when Earle goes cold.

He’s been recruited by a declining older master criminal, Mac, to lead a robbery at a resort hotel in Tropico Springs, in the Sierras. His team is amateurish and full of themselves. He does his best to put them in order, but you feel how forced and unlikely it is from the start.

Earle is biding his time living in a cabin alongside Babe and Red, the two who are going to help him carry out the robbery. And there’s Louis, the inside man at the resort, a desk clerk who will make sure they get access to the cash and the strong boxes containing the resort’s guests’ valuables.

Then there’s Marie. She’s not part of the plan, but Babe and Red liked her and took her to the cabin. They even managed to spill the plan to her. Roy wants to send her away, but he gives in — there’s that soft spot. He thinks she’s okay. She’s pretty hardened herself, a hustler maybe in the later days of her prime but he’s in the last days of his. He’s not in love with her, but, like I said, he thinks she’s okay. Better for that matter than Babe and Red. She’s the one he feels he can count on, so she gets a part to play.

And there’s Pard. Pard is a dog living at the cabins, a stray. Pard adopts Roy. Pard knows a soft spot when he sees one. (Pard doesn’t die in the story, so don’t worry. I always do).

There’s a very important subplot. Roy by chance meets the Goodhues, Pa and Ma, and their granddaughter Velma. They have left their midwestern farm to move west in a rickety old car. They are “good folks.”

Velma is an attractive young girl hampered by a clubfoot. Roy falls for Velma.

It’s not just that she’s attractive and young — she takes his mind and heart back to his own youth, as a son of a farming family in the midwest. Velma is a farm daughter/grandaughter. Roy drifts wistfully through daydreams of that idealized past.

Roy wants a lift he can’t have. The pastoral life he left behind in Indiana, with his brother Elmer and his Aunt Minnie. When he left, he left. But Velma and her family relight the spark in him for that life.

Mac and others tell him he can’t go back, that he’d turned a corner when he joined up with Dillinger and left that life. Even Dillinger had told him he was on a fast, short track, that both of them were.

But he still wants it, and he’s irresistibly draw to it, until things break down with Velma. He’s paid for an operation to fix Velma’s foot, she’s walking and running and dancing, and not falling ln love with Roy.

Everything goes south. The gods of noir have their way. Velma doesn’t want him. Babe and Red blow the robbery. Louis sings to the cops.

Roy, in the wake of Velma’s rejection, realizes what he has in Marie. Marie is in love with him, and she’s in the life that he really lives, not the one he fantasizes about.

The gods of noir are cruel. They won’t leave anything standing. Except maybe Roy’s dream. You can reconcile all that for yourself when you read the book.

I will say one thing about the movie, and the ending of the book. The book is true to itself. The movie isn’t. Although W.R. Burnett is among those credited for the screenplay, it diverges from the book in a sappy, Hays Code-inspired ending that grabs that bit of humanity and sensitivity in the story and blows it out of proportion.

The book doesn’t do that. I’m not spoiling the ending by saying that. The movie spoiled the ending, but fortunately, the book has a different one.

The Asphalt Jungle

This is another one of Burnett’s stories that is so iconic within noir, based on the movie version, that it’s hard to read the book without playing the movie in your head as you read. Doc Riemenschneider will always be Sam Jaffe. Dix Handley just is Sterling Hayden. No use fighting it.

Like the movie, the story is an ensemble story. Unlike High Sierra, where the story is pretty tightly focused on one character, here Burnett moves like a spirit inhabiting one, then another character, conveying each character’s thoughts and perceptions.

It’s very much a character-driven story. The robbery at the core of the story is almost like a MacGuffin, just there as a vehicle for the characters to ride.

Riemenschneider’s superpower is control. But he lives in a world of chance and, as he says, “the vagaries” of his associates. He plans the robbery meticulously, then sits back calmly, pushes the start button, and directs the production. We already know, since this is noir, it’s not going to go as planned. It’s that force of chance and those “vagaries.” Just waiting to jump out of the bushes.

Dix is the other character that Burnett spends the most time with. Dix is a stereotypical. but still real. “hard man.” The “hooligan” in the group Riemenschneider puts together. Not very smart, but coldly competent. He’s a petty thief, knocking over clubs and stores for a living. The robbery Riemenschneider brings him in on is a big chance for him.

Dix, a bit like Roy Earle in High Sierra, longs for another life — one he left back in Kentucky, raising and breaking horses. That’s what he’s going to go back to once he’s paid off for the robbery.

We get a hint that Dix’s ideal life in Kentucky may not be exactly translatable into reality. He keeps coming back to a story from his youth, of breaking a horse his father told him he couldn’t break. But he didn’t break the horse, he just tells himself the story as if he did.

The other characters are all interesting as well, just not the kind of landing places in the story for Burnett’s treatment that Riemenschneider and Dix are. Louis, aptly called “Schemer.” Gus, the newsstand owner, a hunchback, and a small-time crime hub. Cobby, the bookie that Riemenschneider first approaches for help putting everything together.

And Emmerich, the crooked lawyer. He’s a great character. Desperate, busted, and full of a confidence that lasts minutes at a time.

Burnett throws all his characters on the field and lets them play out the robbery game.

You probably won’t relate whole-heartedly to any one character. But you can find that little edge in each, e.g., the control obsession in Riemenschneider or the temptation to dare yourself beyond your abilities that Emmerich suffers from, to recognize and draw back from. Cautionary tales. show less

I read an annotated version of this book within Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s.

Little Caesar is the first major gangster novel, published in 1929. It was made into a famous 1931 movie--and essentially created the gangster stereotype (one I became most familiar with through Bugs Bunny cartoons). The book itself is an interesting study on the 'voice' of a book, as the author goes deep into gangster lingo. At the end of my edition, the editor included a foreword that the author show more wrote in the 1950s about the writing and rejection process behind the book. He made a conscious choice to strip away adjectives to make the prose bloody and blunt. It works. The book doesn't try to make you like its characters--it just shows them as they are. I was grateful to have the annotations to help me parse the lingo and explain details about Chicago and guns of the period.

I never would have expected to like the book this much, but it fascinated me. It shows the era with all its ugliness and racism and dames and plates of spaghetti with wine. Now I want to watch the movie to compare. show less

Una tipica vicenda noir degli anni '50 dello scorso secolo, con una banda di balordi che mette a segno il colpo del secolo, un commissario apparentemente impermeabile a qualsiasi genere di umanità e ben deciso a sradicare la criminalità, nani e ballerine assortiti, e il caso, l'imponderabile, la sfiga per dirla tutta, che ci mettono il naso, e tutto va a rotoli.
Bello e nerissimo.