“Who was he?” shouted Rico.
Red thought for a moment then he said :
“I can’t seem to remember. He’s a wop, all right, a bald-headed wop.”
“Scabby!” Rico exclaimed.
Good God, wasn’t that a break! Scabby hated him and Scabby would sell his own mother out for a split on seven grand. Rico felt resentful. Just his damn luck to get mixed up with a bunch of yellow-bellies and softies.
Chiggi came in.
“Cab out in front, Louis,” he said.
Rico pointed at Red.
“That guy spilled the works. For two bits I’d bump him off.”
Rico was furious. He made a move toward his armpit, but one of the bartenders opened the door and yelled: “The bulls!”
“What!” cried Rico.
The bartender was trembling all over and his face was white.
“Police car out in front, boss.”
Rico made a dive for the door but Chiggi grabbed him by the arm.
“Out the back, Louis.”
Chiggi leapt across the room and pulled a switch and all the lights in the place went out. Then he took Rico by the arm and led him through the hall and out into a little court at the rear.
“So long, Louis,” he said.
Chiggi slammed the door. Rico was in utter darkness.
“A hell of a chance I got,” he said.
He stepped cautiously out into the alley back of the court and took a look around. The alley was blind to his right; to his left it came out onto a main thoroughfare and there was a bright arc light at that end. Rico took out his gun and moved slowly toward the arc light.
“You can’t never tell,” he said; then, in an access of rage: “They’ll never put no cuffs on this baby.”
When he was within fifty feet of the main thoroughfare a man appeared at the end of the alley way, a big man in a derby hat. He saw Rico and immediately blew a blast on his whistle. Rico raised his gun and pulled the trigger; it missed fire.
Rico was frantic. He wanted to live. For the first time in his life he addressed a vague power which he felt to be stronger than himself.
“Give me a break! Give me a break!” he implored.
The man in the derby hat raised his arm and Rico rushed him, pumping lead. Rico saw a long spurt of flame and then something hit him a sledge-hammer blow in the chest. He took two steps, dropped his gun, and fell flat on his face. He heard a rush of feet up the alley.
“Mother of God,” he said, “is this the end of Rico?”
Is this the end of Rico (Edward G. Robinson)? The conclusion of the 1931 film of Little Caesar.
64 A town in Indiana, about 23 miles south-southeast of Chicago; Blue Island, Illinois, is slightly closer, almost due south of Chicago.
65 The practice of keeping detailed physical descriptions of criminals on file began in France in the late nineteenth century. Before fingerprinting, there was Bertillonage, or the Bertillon system, which aimed to classify criminals through bodily measurements. The system was the creation of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), who joined the Paris police force in 1879 and became its head of criminal identification. Inspired by his anthropologist father, Bertillon reasoned that while a criminal might alter his appearance by wearing a wig, or conceal his identity by using an alias, his physical dimensions were nearly impossible to change. Under the Bertillon system, officers took two pictures of each suspect, one face-forward and one side view (Bertillon is often credited with popularizing both the mug shot and the crime-scene photo) and then carefully noted on an index card the precise dimensions of the suspect’s head, various limbs, and appendages; any defining body characteristics; and in particular, the shape of the ear. Eleven different measurements were taken in all. The Bertillon system was officially adopted in France in 1888, and its use quickly spread to police departments throughout the world.
A self-portrait of Alphonse Bertillon, demonstrating how “Bertillon photos” were used, ca. 1900.
“Bertillon pictures” (more commonly known as “mug shots”) were commonplace by the 1920s. For example, according to the records of the City of New York, while only 809 subjects were photographed in 1904, producing 9,468 “Bertillon pictures,” only three years later, these numbers had increased to 4,587 and 54,480, respectively.
66 As the name implies, a hotel for single men, usually providing dining and card rooms.
67 The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary was built in 1899 as part of the expansion of the federal prison system. Al Capone was incarcerated there before his transfer to Alcatraz in 1934; many other famous figures of organized crime were imprisoned there over its history. Today it is primarily used for in-transit prisoners.
The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, 1911.
68 Machine-guns. According to Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld (New York: Bonanza Books, 1961), the name appears to have originated with guns used to spray insecticide (p. 620)!
APPENDIX
Introduction69
by W. R. Burnett
It was 1928. Winter. A cold and gloomy Chicago afternoon, with sparse snow falling from a slate colored sky. I had less than five dollars to my name, a worn overcoat, a hand me down suit that had seen better days, and I was headed for the cheapest restaurant on the North Side, but . . . I’d never been so happy before in my life. The galley proofs of Little Caesar, which had arrived from New York that day, were in my overcoat pocket.
I remember vividly the look of the snow covered street and of the little restaurant with the steaming coffee urns and the tired faced counterman. As I ate, with snow falling past the befogged windows and a couple of taxi drivers talking politics in a corner, I got out the galleys and ostentatiously began to go through them. To my disappointment nobody asked me what they were.
It’s strange that I’d remember such an insignificant moment and forget so many more important things, but that is the truth of the matter.
It had been a long struggle. I’d written for over six years without selling a line, working meanwhile as a statistician for the State of Ohio, in Columbus. Fed up with office routine—and I still hate the sight of an office—I had quit my job and moved on to Chicago, where my father was managing repossessed hotels for the Chicago Title and Trust.
On me, an outsider, an alien from Ohio, the impact of Chicago was terrific. It seemed overwhelmingly big, teeming, dirty, brawling, frantically alive. The pace was so much faster than anything I’d been used to; rudeness was the rule; people seemed to have no time to be friendly, no time to desist for one moment from whatever it was they were pursuing. Broke, jobless, a nobody, I fought hard to keep my balance in one of the most blankly indifferent, one of the toughest cities in the world.
Capone70 was King. Corruption was rampant. Big Bill Thompson,71 the mayor, was threatening to punch King George of England in the “snoot.” Gangsters were shooting each other all over town; in fact, I “heard” one killing over the radio.72 It happened in a cafe while a dance band broadcast was in progress. Two shots came over distinctly, the music slurred to an abrupt stop, then the air went dead. I can’t remember the name of the gangster who was killed to the blaring of a jazzband, but it’s a matter of record.
I spent my first night in Chicago in a cheap little hotel—of the flea bag variety—on the North Side. Just as I was falling asleep there was a terrific explosion directly across the street. Windows rattled; curtains blew wildly, and my bed gave a leap that nearly threw me to the floor. Almost at once there were two more explosions, blocks away this time, but close enough. I got up, dressed, and went down to the lobby, where a sleepy eyed night clerk explained that there was a price war going on among garage owners, things had got rough, and apparently the “boys” had decided to toss a few “pineapples.”73 The clerk did not appear to be disturbed or even very interested. The whole thing seemed natural enough to him.
Early the next morning I went across the street to where a couple of dull eyed loafers were staring apathetically at a huge rag
ged hole the “pineapple” had made in the solid brick wall of the garage. I talked to one of the mechanics, who shrugged and said: “Aw, you know. Just one of them things.”
When I, an outsider, brought all of this up in conversation, the average citizen of Chicago would laugh at me and explain that it was just a lot of nonsense in the newspapers and that as for himself, although he’d lived in the city all of his life, he’d never so much as seen a gangster. This struck me as a peculiar and rather interesting form of ostrichism.
Vincent Starrett,74 not at all an average citizen, knew better. He said that Chicago was as archaic, as dangerous as a city of the Middle Ages.
I walked about everywhere, went every place. I tried hard to take it all in. By luck, I met a police reporter who talked to me off the record. I was appalled, then interested. A book began to take shape vaguely in my mind, a book dealing with the darker side of this archaic, dangerous city.
I began to make notes. I wrote a few paragraphs, then pages. Finally I typed out the author’s hopeful legend, Chapter One, and started to work in earnest. A week or so later I threw away everything I’d written, and began to read books on crime, for a lead. By chance, I discovered a volume put out by the Chicago University Press, dealing with gangsterism in Chicago.75 In this coldly factual survey, I came across an account of the rise and fall of the Sam Cardinelli gang.76 This account served as the nucleus for the novel that was originally called The Furies, and later, by a tremendous stroke of luck, Little Caesar.
I started again, but stopped, dissatisfied. I still didn’t have the right handle, or, as they say in Hollywood, the wienie, the gimmick. Suddenly one night it came to me. The novel should be a picture of the world as seen through the eyes of a gangster. All conventional feelings, desires, and hopes should be rigidly excluded. Further, the book should be written in a style that suited the subject matter—that is, in the illiterate jargon of the Chicago gangster. I threw overboard what had been known up to then as “literature.” I declared war on adjectives. I jettisoned “description.” I tried to tell the story entirely through narration and dialogue, letting the action speak for itself. I also jettisoned “psychology”—and I tried hard to suppress myself and all of my opinions.
Even so, I do not think Little Caesar would have come off, if I hadn’t met a young man on the North Side, who seemed, on first acquaintance, merely to own and manage a barbershop. We went to the fights together, we bowled, we had lunch or dinner quite often. This plausible young fellow, an Italian American in his late twenties, was the pay off man for the biggest mob on the North Side. He was close mouthed with me for a long time, until it dawned on him that though a writer I was not a newspaper man, but just a sort of oddball, who, for some God-forsaken reason, went around making up stories and writing them down, fairy tales to him.
“Why?” he wanted to know. “What’s the percentage? Why don’t you get a job on the Trib?”
He was a very practical young man and in many respects reminded me of the bond salesmen and businessmen I’d known in Columbus before my escape to Chicago. They, too, were practical. They, too, could not see any sense at all in writing fiction, something that had never even “happened.” Why not get a job on the Columbus Dispatch if you wanted to be a writer? They, like the young Chicago hoodlum—let’s call him John—were “all business.”
John, however, had none of their second thoughts and none of their hypocrisy, and he carried practicality to an extreme that would have appalled them. For instance, in talking about a business rival, he once said: “You give him a chance, see? A good chance. You reason with him. You say, ‘look, fellow; there’s room for all of us, so don’t be so greedy.’ If he won’t listen, if he stays greedy, lousing you up . . . then . . . pow! He asked for it.” In other words the rival was definitely not a “practical” man and simply got what was coming to him.
I must say that when I first started to talk with John my understanding was clouded by many old-fashioned notions. I was under the impression that murder—or, as John would have said, a rub-out—was morally wrong and that the murderer was bound to suffer pangs of conscience and remorse. I even said something like this. John stared at me in consternation, then almost choked laughing. Was I kidding? Do soldiers in a war suffer stuff like that? What was the difference if a guy rubbed out Germans or “impractical” business rivals? I must be nuts.
In short, I gradually and painfully acquired from John an entirely new and fresh way of looking at the world. It was not a pretty way; it was more than a little frightening; but it was certainly “practical” and was later taken over lock, stock, and barrel by all the tyrants—all the little Caesars—of Europe. Better yet, although only realizing it little by little, I was getting exactly what I needed to make a real book of the manuscript I was laboring over: a picture of the world as seen through the eyes of a gangster.
Later, John bragged that he had bought the first copy of Little Caesar sold on the North Side. He thought the book was pretty good, but there was one thing that puzzled him very much. I was a college guy, wasn’t I? Then how come I wrote such lousy grammar!
When I finished Little Caesar I gave it to my father to read. He liked it and said: “I really think you’ve hit it this time, Bill.” I felt very much encouraged by this, especially as my father had a strong “practical” side himself. For several years he’d been trying to get me to give up “wasting my time” and learn the hotel business.
An earlier novel of mine had been turned down by Scribner’s, but the rejection had been considerably softened by a few kind words of encouragement from a Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins. I, being a Midwestern country boy, did not know Maxwell Perkins from Maxwell Anderson; had no idea of his standing in New York; but I remembered him as the only editor in the country—I’d tried them all with one manuscript or another—who had ever taken the trouble to send me a personal note instead of the routine rejection slip.
I was so anxious to get the ms. of Little Caesar off to him that, in spite of my financial condition, I sent it airmail, special. It was back in less than three weeks. Mr. Perkins did not like it. Meanwhile I’d consulted the only literary man I knew at the time—Vincent Starrett—and had discovered that Perkins was considered to be New York’s leading publishers’ editor. I’m afraid I bragged about this to my father and he did not let me forget it when the manuscript came back with such speed.
We had a serious talk. He said: “Are you stupid, thick, or what? You’ve wasted six years of your life bending over a typewriter. You are twenty-seven years old, no longer young. Get wise. Learn the hotel business.”
How could I argue with him? I threw Little Caesar in the trunk and took a job as night clerk in a big North Side hotel. I found it harder to stand than the Columbus statistical office. One night I said to myself: “Rather than spend my life working in a hotel—or a business office—I’ll walk into Lake Michigan till my hat floats.”
But it turned out that this was not necessary. After a few weeks of hotel work, I got Little Caesar out of the trunk, reread it, liked it better than before, sent it off to The Dial Press—and . . . well . . . the rest may not be history, but it was certainly the turning point of my life.
Little Caesar was that rare thing, an all around smash. It made me. It made Eddie Robinson. And it did very well for the Literary Guild and Warner Brothers. It was published in June, 1929, nearly thirty years ago, and it is still a live book, with a new edition just off the press in England, not to mention the new American edition, a copy of which you are now holding in your hand. It has been translated into twelve languages, including English, as a witty friend of mine says.
Edward G. Robinson in his iconic role as Rico Bandello, the eponymous “Little Caesar,” from the 1931 film of Little Caesar.
I am sure that the title had a lot to do with the novel’s success. It would be hard to find one more apt, and yet I hit on it, in a sense, by accident. As I stated above, the original title was The Furies—far too literary and no
t in keeping with the tone of the book, a slang novel, even a proletarian novel, if you like, on the order of Bubu de Montparnasse.77 Well . . . when I was half through the book I started to have qualms. Rico, the leading figure, began to take on nightmare proportions in my imagination and I couldn’t help wondering if I was on the right track after all—I was afraid I was giving birth to a monster. But then a consoling thought came to me—out of the blue or the subconscious, as you prefer—my leading figure, Rico Bandello, killer and gang leader, was no monster at all, but merely a little Napoleon, a little Caesar.
—W. R. Burnett
West Los Angeles, California
October, 1957
69 The following introduction first appeared in the 1957 edition of Little Caesar.
70 Alphonse “Al” Gabriel Capone (1899-1947) was the head of the criminal underworld in Chicago. Capone came to rise during Prohibition, as the production and distribution of liquor became a highly profitable endeavor supported by a large segment of the population. Born in New York, he moved to Chicago in his twenties, becoming the right-hand man of mob boss Johnny Torrio. When Torrio stepped down in 1925 after being attacked, Capone became the gang’s leader. His corrupt relationship with Chicago mayor William Thompson (see note 71) was an important part of the primarily-Italian mob’s success. Although he cultivated popularity as a modern Robin Hood, the violent killings of gangsters roused the public’s ire, and he became “Public Enemy No. 1.” In 1931, the federal government successfully prosecuted him for income tax evasion, and Capone went to prison. He became increasingly crippled with syphilis and gonorrhea, and when he eventually emerged from incarceration in 1939, he was a broken and deranged man.
71 William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson (1869–1944) was a Chicago politician who served as mayor from 1915 to 1923 and 1927 to 1931. He created a powerful political machine, epitomized by the slogan “vote early and vote often” (occasionally attributed to Capone and later credited to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley) and was openly corrupt, called by some historians the most unethical mayor in history.
Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s Page 111
