High Sierra

By W. R. Burnett and Cullen Gallagher

HIGH SIERRA

Big Mac buys Roy Earle's pardon because he needs a gunman on a heist job in California. There are three of them in on it besides Roy: Red, Babe and Louis, the inside man. But Roy didn't figure on Marie, Babe's girl. At first Roy wants Marie out of there, but he soon realizes that she's got more brains than the other

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stark House Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886010138

Book preview

Big Mac buys Roy Earle’s pardon because he needs a gunman on a heist job in California. There are three of them in on it besides Roy: Red, Babe and Louis, the inside man. But Roy didn’t figure on Marie, Babe’s girl. At first Roy wants Marie out of there, but he soon realizes that she’s got more brains than the other three put together. Besides, she makes good company. But Roy’s heart already belongs to Velma, a club-footed girl he meets on the road. She reminds him of his youth, and better days . . . before life hardened his heart. But Velma’s heart belongs to another. And Roy’s got a job to do. And now Babe’s out of the picture, and it’s just Roy and Marie . . .

There are moments of reality in his books that are quite overpowering. More than once they’ve had me breaking into sweat. John Huston, director & actor

Should be read by any fan of the darker recesses of noir. Bruce Grossman, Bookgasm

Swift, tense . . . again Burnett shows underworld figures in full stature. Atlanta Journal

The excitement becomes almost unbearable . . . Cincinnati Times Star

HIGH SIERRA

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HIGH SIERRA

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, and copyright © 1940 by W. R. Burnett. Reprinted in paperback by Bantam Books, New York, 1950. Copyright renewed March 16, 1967 by William Riley Burnett.

Reprinted by permission of the Estate of W. R. Burnett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

All Roads Lead to Crime copyright © 2022 by Cullen Gallagher.

ISBN: 978-1-951473-73-0

Book design by Mark Shepard, shepgraphics.com

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

First Stark House Press Edition: May 2022

All Roads Lead to Crime: W. R. Burnett’s

High Sierra and The Asphalt Jungle

by Cullen Gallagher

There’s an old Italian proverb, Tutte le strade portano a Roma. Translated, it means, All roads lead to Rome. The saying came about because so many roads began in Rome and went outward to other parts of Rome; thus, all roads eventually lead home, back to Rome. Figuratively, the proverb has come to reflect a sense of fatalism, and that there’s more than one road that can be taken to get to the same ultimate destination.

Applied to the work of W. R. Burnett, one could say, All roads lead to crime. It aptly describes not only the trajectory of so many of his novels—both of the works collected here, High Sierra (1940) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949), fittingly begin with characters en route to destinations where they intend to commit crime—but also the overwhelming feeling of inevitable doom that permeates every step of the characters’ journeys. You sure you know where you’re going, buddy? the cab driver of The Asphalt Jungle asks as his fare exits in a shady part of town, to which ex-con Erwin Riemenschneider just nods. Taken at face value, the question means just what it says; but on a deeper level, Burnett is already questioning the larger direction of Erwin’s life, and the decision he is about to make, which will either make him a rich man, put him behind bars, or end his life altogether.

All roads lead to crime could also rightly apply to the career of Burnett, himself. He may not have started out to be a crime novelist, but all of his background and youthful experiences helped him become one of the most singular and influential crime novelists, not only of his day, but of all time.

From Ohio to Little Caesar

It was the closing weeks of the nineteenth century when W. R. Burnett was born, Thanksgiving 1899. His family, then living in Springfield, OH, had been involved with politics for generations. W. R.’s grandfather (after whom he was named) had been mayor of Columbus. His father worked under Governor James Cox. W. R., after abandoning a youth dalliance in collegiate sports, followed in their shoes and worked for Governor Cox while he was campaigning for president against Warren Harding (at the time an Ohio senator) in 1920. These experiences would form the foundation for Burnett’s unique literary perspective: I got interested in writing about crime because of things I was exposed to in my boyhood. Not criminals—politicians, the author revealed to Cecil Smith in a 1954 Los Angeles Times profile. I knew from my earliest memory of how politics and crime were interwoven.¹

Unsatisfied with his post-political life as a statistician for the Ohio Department of Industrial Relations, Burnett dreamed of becoming a writer. He began to read voraciously, with a predilection for the French, especially Balzac and Prosper Mérimée, noted Ken Mate and Pat McGilligan in their interview with the author. He went to the public library on his lunch hour and after work wrote into the wee hours of the morning, a discipline he maintained until his dying day.²

After failing to sell several books, Burnett conceived of a drastically different sort of crime novel. "My idea for [Little] Caesar was to write a story from the viewpoint of a gangster, see the world through his eyes, Burnett told Cecil Smith. To do this, I had to know gangsters. I went to Chicago—this was the 20s when Chicago was like Hollywood, gangsters were the stars and money flowed like water. A newspaper reporter named Ryan took me around and introduced me to some of the people. One was a pay-off man for a big North Side gang. I moved into his hotel. He was suspicious of me at first but when I told him I was an author and wanted to write a book he laughed at me and said I was a fool and told me everything. He gave me Caesar."³

Little Caesar (1929) told the story of Rico, aka Cesare Bandello, a lieutenant in Sam Vettori’s mob who dreams of being on top. During a New Year’s Eve holdup of a swanky club, Rico kills a police officer, in direct violation of orders not to shoot anybody. The murder throws the gang—and all of Chicago—into chaos. Rico takes control of the gang, but even that is not enough to satiate his desire for control. The book is almost 100 years old, so I think it’s safe to somewhat spoil the conclusion by saying things don’t end too well for Rico, culminating with the famous last words, Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?

Little Caesar is important not only because it made Burnett a literary star and brought him to the attention of Hollywood (where he would either write, or be adapted, 69 times), but also because it introduced what would become the archetypal Burnett protagonist: a man driven by rapacious and self-destructive ambition. More importantly, Burnett portrayed the gangster not as an arch-villain, but as a real human being. The criminal may be a moron, a victim of glandular disturbance, an atavism, a plain scoundrel or whatever you like, Burnett explained. He is undoubtedly a great menace to society, but he is at least an unstandardized male in an overstandardized civilization and, as such, is interesting.⁴

Stylistically, Burnett wrote Little Caesar using the language spoken by a hundred million Americans; slangy, direct, simple, as he explained in Jail Breaker, a magazine serial that romanticizes (and greatly exaggerates) Burnett’s genesis of Little Caesar.⁵ The story is about Arthur Jones, a statistician for the Ohio Department of Industrial Relations, who dreams of being a writer (sound familiar?). After the police mistake him for Mannion, an escaped killer, they give Jones a passport confirming his identity. Ben Healy, a newspaperman, wants to capitalize on the coincidence by hiring Jones to write a serial about Mannion’s life. Mannion, hearing about the passport, threatens Jones, and uses the passport by night while hiding in his apartment by day. Jones, of course, sees the opportunity of a lifetime. In a flash, he saw how he could write his book and make it something beyond the commonplace story of a bandit, written for commonplace, illiterate readers. He would write it in the simplest language possible, using the idiom of the man himself; the average newspaper reader would find this to his taste, but would never suspect that he was reading an exercise in style and that the author was deliberately avoiding the use of literary English.⁶

The Road to High Sierra

For the decade after Little Caesar, Burnett’s crime writing appeared mostly in magazines and on the screen. Instead, many of his 1930s novels were more literary efforts. Iron Man (1930, available from Stark House Press), is about the rise and fall of a boxer. Saint Johnson (also 1930), inspired by the legend of Wyatt Earp, would be Burnett’s first western, a genre he would revisit frequently throughout his career. The Silver Eagle (1931, serialized in Collier’s as Protection) revisited the world of Little Caesar (it even reuses the name of the club that Rico held up, Casa Alvardo), but instead of focusing on gangsters, Burnett instead tells the story of Frank Harworth, a businessman who owns several restaurants and nightclubs but who is more interested in climbing the social ladder than in underworld domination.

Taking a big step away from crime, The Giant Swing (1932) is about Joe Nearing, a pianist who longs to break free from the small-town dance hall and write serious music in New York City. Inspired by Burnett’s own gambling addiction, Dark Hazard (1933) is about Jim Turner, a hotel clerk whose passion for dog racing leads him to great heights, and even greater depths. Though the titular industrialist of Goodbye to the Past: Scenes from the Life of William Meadows (1934) is not a gangster, he is one of Burnett’s most cut-throat protagonists; told in reverse order, this is also Burnett’s most formally experimental novel. King Cole (1936), about a gubernatorial candidate that incites a riot in order to win votes, makes use of Burnett’s own political background; the title character’s willingness for violence rivals any of Burnett’s underworld characters. And in Dark Command: A Kansas Iliad (1938), Burnett again returns to the frontier for a grim western based on Quantrill.

All of these novels were important for Burnett to refine his style, themes, and characters, for his next novel would be one of his masterpieces.

A Modern Western

Burnett’s first fully-fledged crime novel since Little Caesar, High Sierra reconfigured the gangster formula he helped establish, blending it with elements from the western genre. Its protagonist, gunman Roy Earle, is no trigger-happy punk with delusions of greatness like Rico; instead, Roy is like a melancholic gunfighter who outlived the Wild West from which he came.

The roots of Roy can be found in a passage from Burnett’s 1936 serial Dr. Socrates. After a nearby bank is robbed by Red Bastian and his gang, the small Midwestern town of Big Bend assembles a local militia. One of the citizens, Professor Talbot, compares Red Bastian to those frontier bandits of yesteryear.

It’s not an unparalleled situation by any means . . . . We’ve had these scoundrels before, overrunning our fair community, and we’ll possibly have them again. The gangster is through, the racketeer is through. The repeal of the prohibition amendment fixed that. The day of the foreign criminal is over. Capone is locked up; a good many of his kind have been killed; all have been scattered. No, friends, we don’t have to worry about that sort of rat any longer. They are practically extinct. But we’ve got something far worse now. We’ve jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. America is developing a new brand of criminal or, rather, the real old-fashioned lawless American type is having a . . . I was going to say renaissance, but that word seems a little out of place. To put it briefly, Jesse James and Billy the Kid and men of that kidney are riding again. And, gentlemen, they’re riding in high-powered cars; they’re equipped with the most modern and most deadly of weapons, the machine-gun. They’re bold and resourceful.

Burnett, himself, remarked on the similarities between High Sierra and the Old West. You see, he told Ken Mate and Pat McGilligan, Dillinger and Roy Earle, such men are not gangsters, organized crime, Mafioso. They were a reversion to the Western bandit. They had nothing in common with the hoodlums in Chicago. An entirely different breed.⁷

High Sierra begins with a masterful opening sentence: Early in the twentieth century, when Roy Earle was a happy boy on an Indiana farm, he had no idea that at thirty-seven he’d be a pardoned ex-convict driving alone through the Nevada-California desert toward an ambiguous destiny in the Far West. This says everything you need to know about the protagonist’s past, his uncertain present, and the grim future that awaits him at the end of the line.

The plot of High Sierra harkens back to Little Caesar: Roy is part of a gang that intends to hold up the high-class Tropico Inn. But instead of an organized mob, he’s part of a rag-tag outfit. Assembling the group is Big Mac, suffering from ill health. Roy is the experienced muscle. Assisting him are two young punks, Red and Babe, who spend most of the time fighting over Marie, who they picked up at a dime-a-dance joint. Roy quickly realizes that the street-smart Marie is tougher and more capable than either of the boys. And the inside-man is Louis Mendoza, the Tropico’s night clerk.

Right away, it’s noticeable how Burnett’s literary novels have shaped and informed High Sierra. Unlike Little Caesar, which is almost primitive in its straight-forward trajectory, High Sierra gives a greater sense of world building. Along the way to the rendezvous, Roy almost crashes into a car with Ma and Pa Goodhue, on their way to California with their granddaughter Velma, who suffers from a clubfoot. Roy will encounter them again, while he is on his way to meet up with Big Mac. Roy takes an interest in Velma, and offers to help pay for the surgery on her foot. This sub-plot takes the story in unexpected directions. It also humanizes Roy, but not in the obvious way: while it certainly shows kindness, it also shows a pathetic side to his character. He’s gullible, blind to the fact that Velma doesn’t love him back; it also shows a sense of desperation, a desire to have a normal life which he can’t have.

Burnett’s characters have always been loners. Even when they’re a group, they’re alone. Rico may have wanted to be the top dog in Vettori’s mob, but he never fit into the organization. Frank Harworth in The Silver Eagle longed to be a member of high society, but since he wasn’t born rich, he never fully belonged. The composer of The Giant Swing literally doesn’t want to be in the band anymore; and when he gets out and finds success, he returns to gloat, only to find that no one in town really cares about his new musical. And Meadows in Goodbye to the Past builds a successful company only to find that he won’t trust anybody and must rule alone. While Roy certainly fits into the loner mold, he’s also quite different from Burnett’s earlier protagonists. One never got the sense that Burnett liked Rico, Harworth, Meadows, or Cole on an emotional level; he was fascinated in them as mythological embodiments of American capitalism. Roy, on the other hand, is imbued with genuine feeling. It’s surprising, and somewhat shocking, that someone as deeply cynical as Burnett could find a person he admired in this world; unlikely as it may be, Roy Earle was that person. And when, at the end, Roy finds himself alone in the mountains, hunted by his fellow man, he’s not just another of Burnett’s Icaruses who flew too close to the sun: instead, he’s a man out of time, pitiable because he could have never lived in this world even if he tried, and empathetic as a rebel who was crushed by the forces surrounding him.

Back to the City

Following High Sierra, Burnett returned to his political roots for The Quick Brown Fox (1942), in which journalist Ray Benedict accidentally turns spoiled expat Brant Harding into a war hero and congressional nominee when he falsely reports that Brant was at Dunkirk. When Ray and his editor, Joe Hill turn against Brant, the whole town turns into a political hot bed, culminating in lawlessness and violence. Like in King Cole, Burnett’s politicians and journalists are even more ruthless than his gangsters.

Next, Burnett returned to the urban crime story with Nobody Lives Forever (1943), a title that could be applied to almost any of his books. Here, Doc Ganson, a disbarred junkie con-man, runs into an old college friend in Los Angeles who now runs a luxury hotel. One of the guests is millionaire widow Gladys Halvorsen. Looking to pull a long-con, Ganson tries to lure suave Jim Farrar out of retirement to pose as an oil baron and fleece the widow. Burnett frequently shifts between characters in this large ensemble narrative, and in this way Nobody Lives Forever feels like a trial run for the structure that Burnett will later use in The Asphalt Jungle.

Burnett followed Nobody Lives Forever with Tomorrow’s Another Day (1945). Gambler Lonnie Drew wins a restaurant and tries to go straight, but when he woos the girlfriend of a rival gangster, the losing man sets out to destroy Drew’s business. Next up was an atypical work, Romelle (1946), a gothic melodrama styled after Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca but transplanted to the San Fernando Valley. Unusual for Burnett, the title character is a woman, a recently fired lounge singer who marries her biggest and only fan after a whirlwind weekend courtship. The husband, however, seems to be keeping secrets: he disappears for days, keeps a locked room in the basement, and has a stalker from his past. The romance genre, however, is not Burnett’s strong suit. Characters in his novels frequently have trouble experiencing any genuine connection with others, let alone expressing sincere feelings, romantic or otherwise. Romelle feels like a stretch for the author; thankfully, he quickly returned to more familiar territory with his next book.

Welcome to the Jungle

Published in 1949, The Asphalt Jungle begins with a quote from philosopher and psychologist William James (brother of celebrated novelist Henry James). The quote was originally part of a speech delivered at the World Peace Congress in Boston on October 7, 1904, and later reprinted in the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly. 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 overarching topic of James’s speech was that the warring instinct was ingrained in mankind, and that society must fight back against that urge.

This is the constitution of human nature which we have to work against. The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself; and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks. The born soldiers want it hot and actual. The non-combatants want it in the background, and always as an open possibility, to feed imagination on and keep excitement going. Its clerical and historical defenders fool themselves when they talk as they do about it. What moves them is not the blessings it has won for us, but a vague religious exaltation. War, they feel, is human nature at its uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical blood-payment.⁸

By starting the book with the James quote, Burnett invokes a Naturalist philosophy, which had long been an inspiration to him, going back to his early days as a statistician reading Balzac on his lunch break. In fact, the author’s initial career goal was to become an American Balzac.⁹ In other interviews, he also cited the influence of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.¹⁰ Burnett’s view on crime was informed by this sensibility. Burnett never moralized about his criminal protagonists. He didn’t write cautionary tales of how crime never pays, nor did he try to psychoanalyze the criminal to find the root of their evil, or look for some social problem that forced them into this way of life. For Burnett, crime was part of the natural order of the world. Some men were criminals. Some were cops. Like beasts in the wilderness, they pursued each other relentlessly.

As evinced by its title, the wilderness is an important metaphor in The Asphalt Jungle. Burnett repeatedly describes the urban landscape in naturalistic terms. Forests of street lights stretched off in all directions. Even the sounds of the city are expressed in animalistic terms: taxis hooted and shrill newsboys cried. In this way, Burnett evokes an uneasy sense of harmony. This is the way of the city, the way of life, the way of human nature.

Despite professing I don’t have any plot in my books. Just life. And the relationship of characters and what happens to them, The Asphalt Jungle undoubtedly has one of the greatest plots in crime fiction history. The fluidity with which Burnett switches between characters is much more sophisticated than in Nobody Lives Forever, and shows the influence that screenwriting has had on his style.

The set-up is simple, and harkens back to Little Caesar and High Sierra. A group of men plan a robbery. In this case, it is a jewel heist led by Erwin Riemenschneider, who got the plan while in prison from an inmate who wants his release bought with the profits. Riemenschneider approaches gambling kingpin Cobby to help organize the job. Cobby brings in criminal lawyer Alonzo Emmerich, who agrees to finance the deal. Dix, an out-of-work heavy—and crazy for horses, is hired as the hooligan, in case any muscle is needed.

What makes The Asphalt Jungle so brilliant is its orchestration. Like an exquisitely composed symphony, every character not only plays their own part, but has their own motivation, and keeps their secrets from the others. The Asphalt Jungle is not an action-oriented novel at all; instead, the story’s tension comes from the psychological power-plays between the characters. Consider the contrapuntal dynamics of a single phone call, when Cobby speaks to Emmerich on the phone to confirm the deal. Cobby knows that Riemenschneider (who is also in the room) doesn’t trust Emmerich and has been searching for other financers. Emmerich, on the other hand, is planning to double-cross everyone and take the jewels for himself. We later learn that Riemenschneider had lied to Cobby from the beginning and never had sought out other funders. For a group that is supposed to be working together for a common goal, they are like bloodsuckers leeching off each other. Burnett even evokes this vampiric metaphor when describing