"Little Men, Big World" (1951) and "Vanity Row (1952)" by W.R. Burnett

The legacy that W.R. Burnett created has eclipsed is own name. His works were adapted into legendary films such as Little Caesar, Iron Man (three times, twice under its original title and once as Some Blondes are Dangerous), Dark Command, High Sierra (three times, first under its original title and then as Colorado Territory and I Died A Thousand Times), Nobody Lives Forever, Yellow Sky, and The Asphalt Jungle (three times, including a western version called The Badlanders, and Cool Breeze). As a screenwriter, his credits include Scarface, The Beast of the City, This Gun For Hire, Background to Danger, The Racket, Illegal, The Great Escape, and dozens more. Burnett, on the page and on the screen, was an essential component in the formation and iteration of gritty realism in several crime sub-genres, such as gangster, hardboiled, and western noir. Not without a sense of humor, Burnett even provided the hoodlum hokum source material for John Ford’s The Whole Town’s Talking.

All of which makes one wonder: Why is most of his work out of print? The answer is certainly not that his novels don’t hold up. In 2009, Stark House Press reprinted a pair of excellent, forgotten books—It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man, both rise-and-fall narratives of self-destructive ambition, the former about a jazz guitarist the latter about a middleweight boxer. In 2015, Stark House returned to Burnett with another double-header of should-be crime classics: Little Men, Big World and Vanity Row.

In his introduction to this volume, author and invaluable crime fiction scholar Rick Ollerman positions these two novels as part of Burnett’s “Urban Trilogy,” along with 1949’s The Asphalt Jungle. “Each one shows a different facet of crime and the reason for its ultimate downfall, related by the strengths but ultimately the weaknesses of the criminals involved. Hoods are people, Burnett shows us, complex and plagued with the same differences in personalities, the same sins and vices, as everyone else.” The crooks here aren’t villains, but schmucks caught in a bureaucratic system that offers no real chance for success. Good guy or bad, Burnett’s characters are all born to lose.

Originally published in 1951, Little Men, Big World is an ensemble narrative of vice and political corruption in an unnamed Midwestern city. At the center of the story is Arky, a bookie whose livelihood is under threat from all sides. There’s a rat in his organization selling out to the Big City boys across the river who want to move in and take over; Ben Reisman, a journalist, is bent on exposing the rackets; and Commissioner Stark wants to run him out of business and clean up the city. It is a book of many mysteries—Who is the informer? Who is the big boss? Who is corrupt and who is on the level? Who will wind up on top and who will fall back into the gutter?—but more than that, it is an exposé of under- and upper-world bureaucracies, the commonalities of their structures, and the ways in which their worlds intersect.

If the urban arena is meant to signify the height of American achievement—where gangsters, reporters, and politicians alike can wield earth-changing influence—in Little Men, Big World Burnett tears the skyscrapers down to one-story stumps. Unlike Horatio Alger and his underdogs, Burnett’s city boys never succeed through hard work and determination. Arky is the most Alger-esque of the bunch, a runaway kid and petty thief who was saved from jail by a benevolent judge. Plucked from the gutter and placed into prominence, Arky well understands the rule of the city: no one gets where they are on their own. From the lowly driver to the high court judge, they were put there for a reason by someone more powerful than them, who was in turn put there by someone even more powerful, and so on up to the top of a never-ending ladder.

The desires of the characters are abstract—Arky, Reisman, and Stark are vying for power and influence, but over who? Certainly, each other, but none have any tangible, clearly defined goal in sight. Arky seems caught in an ever-changing game of chess, shifting people’s positions and moving locations but never making any actual change. Stark wants to wipe out graft, when by his own admission, “as long as men want to gamble, there will be gambling an army couldn’t stop.” Reisman has risen from beat reporter to syndicated columnist, yet he is now “bored, depressed, at loose ends … he’d really hit bottom.” And what does his career even matter when he suffers from a potentially life-threatening ulcer? Burnett undercuts their ambitions by emphasizing the futility of their visions.

More than just a “crime doesn’t pay” parable, Little Men, Big World projects such a deeply cyncial worldview that even antiheroes can’t be celebrated. Burnett humanizes his pawns before utterly humiliating them. Arky might control the local rackets, but when his girlfriend brings her infant niece into the house, he finds himself emasculated and powerless; Arky’s thuggish driver, Turkey, is made to wear and apron and struggle to cook breakfast as part of his duties; Stark cleans up the underworld but he’s so unworldly not to recognize the ulterior motives behind his own promotion; and Reisman, whose ulcer bookends the novel, is the biggest fool of all for thinking he has made a change in the world when really nothing has changed, he’s only one step closer to death.

Vanity Row, Burnett’s follow-up in 1952, seems very pedestrian on the surface. Police Captain Roy Hargis is investigating the death of a big shot lawyer, and both his superiors and the underworld are putting the pressure on him to pin the murder on the lawyer’s mistress, Ilona Vance, who naturally Hargis falls in love with and believes is innocent. These broad narratives strokes were nothing extraordinary at the time, and are even less so now, but the significance of Vanity Row lies not in its formula but in Burnett’s politically-rooted skepticism of such archetypes. Hargis is another of Burnett’s corporate cogs, placed into power by a character euphemistically referred to as the “big political boss.” Hargis’s unmerited advancement was so he could be used to circumvent official procedure and cut through red tape. Living in a swank hotel and accepting “favors,” Hargis more closely resembles a gangster than a cop, a division made even more complicated by Hargis’ earnest (and naïve) ambition to be a righteous hero. Burnett’s cynical worldview, however, doesn’t allow for such easy chivalry: In a world in which there is no clear line between good and bad, or right and wrong, how can you know which side you are truly on?

As the investigation gets deeper and more dangerous, Hargis futilely puts his career and life on the line to absolve Ilona Vance. Subverting the traditional moral balance of crime novels, the revelation of truth in the final chapters does not set everything right. Justice, in Burnett’s world, is never just: it is a political tool, like money, influence, and power, and it is inherently corrupt.

As a social documentarian, Burnett offers a fascinating and morally ambiguous counterpoint to contemporaneous procedurals like Dragnet. He doesn’t view crime as a battle between cops and robbers, and forensics aren’t a literary tool to piece together an incomplete narrative. Instead, Burnett posits cops and robbers as complements in a fluid structure with no clear diving line, and police methodology not a means to a truthful, more complete narrative but just an added layer of and adulterated facts and obscured certitudes. In Little Men, Big World and Vanity Row, the mysteries might be solved, but the real problems still remain.

This review was originally published at The Life Sentence on October 12, 2015. It appears here in a slightly revised form.

"Stretch Dawson" by W.R. Burnett (Gold Medal, 1950)

W.R. Burnett’s Stretch Dawson was published in 1950. #106, it was not only the eighth book published by Gold Medal (since the numbering began at 99), but it was also their first Western. At the time, Burnett was the biggest name to appear in the Gold Medal line up to that point. His first success was the gangster epic Little Caesar in 1929, and after that he continued to appear in hardcover, while also penning some terrific movies in Hollywood. The year before Stretch Dawson, Knopf published a hardcover edition of The Asphalt Jungle, which would become one of the best film noirs by John Huston the following year.

Stretch Dawson is the leader of a band of outlaws that crawls its way out of the badlands only to find themselves trapped in a ghost town with an aging miner and his gun-toting granddaughter (curiously nicknamed “Mike” because of her tomboy image). Right away, Stretch finds himself torn between his gang, who wants to steal the old man’s gold, and his affection for Mike, who is equally conflicted between her loyalty to her grandfather and her newly awakened sexuality.

With its swift moving plot and stirring action, Stretch Dawson is an entertaining and worthwhile read. The first third is very strong, especially the opening horse chase through in the badlands, as well as the tense run ins with the trigger-happy granddaughter; the second third hits a slump with too much dull romance (Stretch’s male magnetism and Mike’s swooning are too one-dimensional), but the book finishes up with a solid finale and a rousing gunfight. It isn’t the best Burnett that I’ve read (the Stark House double with It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man are both superior), but it still stands out as an interesting facet of Burnett’s career.

Hollywood made a terrific movie out of the book called Yellow Sky, which was directed by the legendary William “Wild Bill” Wellman and adapted by Lamar Trotti. As good as the book is, this is one instance in which the movie is better. The location shooting in Lone Pine, California looks beautiful in black-and-white, while Death Valley has never looked so desolate. Also, the stellar cast really brings the characters to life. Gregory Peck finds the right balance of charm and darkness as Stretch; Stretch’s rival is played by Richard Widmark, one of my favorite actors, and certainly one of the best villains in film history; and Anne Baxter’s Mike is tougher and less naïve than in the book, and just as ruthless as Stretch, which makes her character more interesting.

As always, a few quotes from the book:

“That blasted gold’s harder to get at than a nun in a convent. From here on in, I stick to bank robbing.”

“Fears and suspicions chased each other through his mind like rats behind a wainscoating. Nervousness grew in him and he began to shake. All at once he took himself in hand, disgusted at the state he was in.”

“Savage shouts rose near the top of the lower slope, then a ragged volley crashed out with stunning violence in the still desert night, and buzzed around the house like a swarm of bees, thudding into the adobe walls and the stout wooden posts, which shuddered under the impact.”

"It's Always Four O'Clock/Iron Man" by W. R. Burnett (Stark House, 2009)

What does it mean to praise an author and his or her work? To assign my own words to describe those of another? I could easily label W.R. Burnett as a “great” writer, or call either of his two novels in the new Stark House Press collection – It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man – “great” works, but somehow that label feels inappropriate considering Burnett’s condemnation of the word in It’s Always Four O’Clock.

“Words, words, words! And I’m stuck for some to use. Words are like painted marbles, they get all the stuff rubbed off of them. Take ‘great.’ What does it mean? It means ‘great,’ you donkeyhead, you yell back at me. All right. So now we got ‘great’ movie actors, and ‘great’ automobiles, and ‘great’ refrigerators and even ‘great’ lipsticks. So what are you going to call George Washington? Do you dig me now?”

Not wanting to be guilty of comparing him to a kitchen appliance, I’ll have to find another way of praising him. He’s graceful or fierce in all the right places, merciless or full of aching sympathy depending on what the moment calls for, and never there’s a word out of place. Burnett manages to be as unconventionally elegant as Royal, the pianist/composer in It’s Always Four O’Clock that defies the borders of jazz and classical, and as direct and no-nonsense as one of Coke Mason’s knockout swings in Iron Man.

The most fitting epithet, however, comes from David Laurence Wilson, who referred to Burnett as “a mercenary with a pen” in his introductory essay, “W.R. Burnett: A Versatile Hardboiled Master.” Interweaving personal remembrances of Burnett (whom he was fortunate enough to know) with keen critical and biographical insight, Wilson evokes not only the intensity with which Burnett uses words, but also his ruthless precision. These two novels are unmistakably the work of the same creator, yet they are so distinct in their styles, so utterly different in their approaches. It’s Always Four O’Clock, with its casual, first-person narrator, seems to take on the freewheeling sensibility of a jam session, while Iron Man’s sparse, removed prose can seem as cold as Coke Mason’s sweat before the big match. What unifies them, then, is the pitch-perfect harmony between the story and the language used by Burnett to tell it.

Originally published in 1956 and finally making its paperback debut, It’s Always Four O’Clock isn’t your typical rise and fall story, partially because the rise is so short lived, but mostly because its fall is filled with the tragic, all-too-human ironies that only an unfortunate survivor can detachedly laugh at on the surface while silently cursing on the inside. Stan Pawley is a jazz guitarist without much ambition, and while he likes the guys he plays with, he knows it’s not real music, that a lot of them are just going through the motions. Then one night in a bar he befriends Royal Mauch, an aloof and eccentric pianist, and together they form a band that pushes all the boundaries their contemporaries refuse to push. Burnett clearly sympathizes with each of the members of the group, all of whom are caught between art and commercialism – between destroying yourself over your work and compromising your work in order to make that paycheck. Self-destructive drive, ambivalence, and opportunism each contribute to the group’s collective downfall, but to Burnett’s credit he doesn’t create easy martyrs or victims, just characters with no easy out.

Whereas It’s Always Four O’Clock is filtered through Stan’s guilt, regret, and pathos, Iron Man (originally published in 1930) betrays no emotion. Told in strictly detached and impersonal third-person, the story unfolds almost entirely through dialogue and objective action. Reading this story of middle-weight boxer Coke Mason, who like Royal Mauch rises through the ranks to mythological heights from which he can’t help but fall, it is no wonder that Hollywood would soon be calling: the emphasis on external action over internal thoughts is made for the movies. The lack of intimacy with the characters also foreshadows the major betrayals and breakups that befall Coke Mason as his career grows: Burnett hides subjectivity in order to emphasize superficiality. In the book’s final pages, when Coke finds himself alone and surrounded by status-centric bloodsuckers, Burnett burrows deep into his character, revealing to us mountains of pain and emotion that even Coke didn’t realize he contained before. Such stylistic orchestration succeeds in making an even greater impact on the reader: when Coke takes those final punches (both literal and figurative), they hurt like nothing else that has come before.

Another way of linking the books that also brings in some of Burnett’s famous works (such as Little Caesar) is that these are quintessential books about America, particularly the conflict of idealism and the way things really work behind closed doors, where corruption and disillusionment run rampant. The Land of Opportunity can sometimes be deceiving: success and wealth may seem they are for the taking, but taking isn’t always the way to achieve them (at least not for very long). “Sometimes it is good to remember even the inconvenient aspects of American culture,” reminds David Laurence Wilson. And he’s right – look at these two books by Burnett, and you’ll see a diverse cross-section of life (in terms of race, class, gender, and politics). More than just portraits of a nation, they are also invaluable commentaries on society and culture at the time.

Quotes, as always.

It’s Always Four O’Clock

“I felt as out of place as a blind man at a burlesque show.”

“Did you ever walk into a wide-awake, enthusiastic, sober gathering of friends when you were drunk, tired, disgusted, sleepy and ready to knock your head against the wall? Then you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. You know. Four A.M. It’s when the world slows down. It’s when things look worst. It’s when most people die.”

Iron Man

“Funny!” he thought. “When I didn’t have Rose I figured if I could find her, I’d never be lonesome no more. Funny! Yeah, and when I was a kid I thought if I could ever be champion I’d be the happiest guy on earth. Funny, how things are!”

"Remember your priorities, dammit."

September? Gone already? Almost end of week 1 of October? I haven't abandoned Pulp Serenade, or replaced it with a new love. Instead, I've fallen into that black hole known as "Graduate School." I am at NYU pursuing my Master's Degree in Cinema Studies. I certainly appreciate the opportunity I have been given, but it hasn't been an easy transition - and the voluminous amount of assigned readings hasn't helped any, either. Last month I didn't pick up a novel or short story to read at all. I read lots and lots about narratology, though my understanding of it is still very vague. I think it is time to leave well enough alone. (Something tells me it will pop up again next semester in Film Theory, however.)

Then one day I received a package in the mail from Jed Ayres over at Hardboiled Wonderland. I won a contest, which I was super psyched about, becaues I can't remember the last time I won something, and definitely nothing as cool as a hardcover of James Ellroy's Destination: Morgue! Inside the book was a handwritten letter, reprinted above (hope you are ok with this, Jed), with four important words:

"Remember your priorities, dammit."

Well, I'm starting to remember.

Also, many thanks to Patti Abbott for checking in with me via email, it was very sweet of her: I am still alive, and am trying to reorganize my life so I still have time for crime fiction and blogging. Two things I miss very much.

A couple of finished interviews coming to you later this week. Also, in the middle of Stark House Press' new collection of W.R. Burnett novels, which is astounding thus far. (Is there any way I can convince my film professors to let me study films written by Burnett??? If any of my teachers are reading this, hint hint...) Plus, this weekend I am taking a break from the academic life and heading to the Hampton's International Film Festival. If I see anything good that is crime-related, I will certainly pass on recommendations.

Ok --- back to work.