“I don’t have any plot in my books. Just life.”
— W. R. Burnett
An unexpected claim from a man who made his living writing about crime. Yet it raises a question worth keeping in mind as we meet William Riley Burnett: what did he see in his characters that mattered more to him than the plot?
Before the Author
William Riley Burnett was born on November 25, 1899, in Springfield, Ohio. His schooling took him through several Ohio towns, including Germantown, where he attended the Miami Military Institute. In 1919, he enrolled in journalism at Ohio State University, but left after one semester. He subsequently found work as a statistician.
The office provided a living; writing occupied his spare hours. For seven years, Burnett worked at manuscripts during evenings and weekends, producing five novels and dozens of short stories without finding a publisher. By 1927, he had spent much of his twenties trying to become an author, with little to show for his persistence beyond more pages.
That year, he and his wife moved to Chicago. Among the jobs he took was work as a hotel night clerk. Away from his desk in Ohio, he began encountering a different company: fighters, hustlers, and men whose business did not bear close examination. He was still an unpublished writer, but his surroundings had changed considerably.
A Change of Company
Chicago offered Burnett more than a change of address. A newspaper reporter introduced him to people who knew the city’s underworld from the inside. Among them was a gang’s pay-off man, initially suspicious of his interest. When Burnett explained that he wanted to write a book, suspicion gave way to amusement—and conversation. Looking back, Burnett described his intention simply:
“My idea for [Little] Caesar was to write a story from the viewpoint of a gangster, see the world through his eyes.”
Listening became part of his apprenticeship. Here were men with their own language, assumptions, and explanations for what they did. Burnett also drew on a study of a Chicago gang, combining research with the voices and encounters around him. Gradually, those materials became the story of Cesare “Rico” Bandello, an ambitious criminal determined to make himself somebody.
Published in 1929, Little Caesar ended the long succession of unpublished manuscripts. The novel became a bestseller; a contemporary TIME profile reported sales approaching 100,000 copies. After years of fitting his ambitions around paid employment, Burnett could finally write full-time.
Lives Outside the Law
The men at the centre of Burnett’s best-known crime novels have reasons to fear an investigation. Their concerns are more immediate: gaining power, choosing whom to trust, or finding enough money to leave their present lives behind. Spending time in their company means hearing how they justify themselves—and noticing what those explanations leave out.
Cesare “Rico” Bandello — Little Caesar (1929)
Rico wants to rise. He watches the men above him, measures their weaknesses, and sees little reason why he should remain subordinate. Violence is a practical means of advancement, and his discipline makes him dangerous: he allows himself few distractions from the business of becoming important.
Burnett once called him a “gutter Macbeth.” The comparison catches the intensity of his ambition. Recognition matters to Rico almost as much as power; he wants others to know that he has become somebody.
Roy Earle — High Sierra (1940)
Released from prison, Roy Earle heads west with another robbery ahead of him. He is an experienced gunman, accustomed to a criminal world in which reputation counts, but his thoughts often return to the Indiana farm of his childhood. Behind his hardened manner survives a longing for a quieter life.
Roy has a capacity for tenderness that makes him difficult to dismiss as merely a dangerous man. His encounters with two young women, Marie and Velma, bring different hopes and attachments into his life. Burnett leaves room for both the robber and the man who wants something beyond the next job, without making either easy to overlook.
The Crew — The Asphalt Jungle (1949)
A jewel robbery requires men with different skills—and enough trust to work together. Fresh out of prison, Doc Riemenschneider has the expertise to devise the operation. Louis Ciavelli knows safes, Gus supplies the driving, and Dix Handley provides the muscle. Behind the proposed financing stands Alonzo Emmerich, a lawyer whose respectable position gives him access to another level of the city.
Each man brings a private life into the arrangement. Louis has a family; Dix carries memories of Kentucky and a wish to return home. Doc’s careful calculations must accommodate people whose concerns extend beyond the job. Their professional abilities may make them useful to one another, but those abilities reveal only part of who they are.
Burnett also follows the police, widening the view beyond the crew. The robbery takes shape within a city of competing interests, where influence and respectability deserve as much scrutiny as a criminal record.
Jim Farrar — Nobody Lives Forever (1943)
Jim Farrar’s principal weapon is charm. A polished confidence man, he is brought into a scheme to relieve a wealthy widow of part of her fortune. His task is to win her confidence, making himself welcome where a more obvious criminal would never get through the door.
But Jim has ambitions of his own. Working with accomplices means sharing the proceeds—and trusting people who make their living through deception. In his company, a reassuring manner gives little indication of what a man may be calculating.
Seeing Through Other Eyes
Burnett gave the criminal room to occupy the centre of the story. Following his characters means entering their calculations: what seems worth risking, whom they consider trustworthy, and how they explain their choices. The reader can understand that outlook without having to approve of it. His restrained narrative voice allows behaviour and dialogue to reveal the person.
In Little Caesar, that approach helped establish a model for the modern gangster novel. Rico’s pursuit of status gives criminal ambition an unsettling familiarity. Money, recognition, and advancement are ordinary desires; the means he chooses to obtain them make him dangerous. As John Scaggs observes, the gangster’s ambitions also belong to a social and economic world in which crime can appear to offer a route upward.
Burnett broadened that perspective beyond the individual. The Asphalt Jungle, Little Men, Big World (1951), and Vanity Row (1952) examine the connections between organized crime, political power, and respectable institutions. The city becomes more than a setting: its arrangements help determine who profits, who receives protection, and who takes the risks.
He also helped shape the heist novel through his attention to assembling a crew, dividing responsibilities, and bringing different personalities into a shared undertaking. The practical details make the operation convincing; the people involved give it tension. Here, his opening claim about “just life” becomes easier to understand. However carefully a job is planned, the participants bring themselves into it.
Later Years
Burnett’s first marriage, to Marjorie Louise Bartow in 1920, ended in divorce in the early 1940s. In 1943, he married Whitney Forbes Johnstone, with whom he had two sons.
He continued writing well beyond the period that produced his most familiar novels. His interests remained broad, taking him into westerns, historical fiction, and stories outside the criminal world. In 1980, the Mystery Writers of America recognized his long career with its Grand Master Award.
His last published novel, Goodbye, Chicago: 1928, End of an Era (1981), returned to the city that had given him his breakthrough more than fifty years earlier. It follows police officers confronting a world in which organized crime and public institutions are deeply entangled. Chicago was still a place he had something to say about.
William Riley Burnett died on April 25, 1982, in Santa Monica, California, aged eighty-two. He had continued publishing into the final year of his life.
Legacy
Burnett’s influence can be difficult to separate from conventions that now seem familiar: the ambitious gangster, the ageing outlaw, the crew of specialists brought together for a robbery. He helped give these figures the language, habits, and private concerns that made them convincing. Later writers inherited a criminal world he had helped furnish.
That influence travelled beyond the United States. In Le Polar, Jean-Jacques Schleret connects the romantic outlaw of High Sierra with French crime writers Albert Simonin, Auguste Le Breton, and José Giovanni, as well as filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville. Burnett’s criminals could carry memories, attachments, and personal codes into stories that never excused their violence.
His career also complicates the familiar account of hard-boiled fiction developing through Black Mask. As Jean Bourdier emphasizes, Burnett followed a separate route into the genre. His novels belong beside the private-eye tradition while asking different questions about the people who inhabit its streets.
The opening claim about “just life” remains debatable. What his work makes clear is how closely he watched the lives from which he made his fiction.
From Page to Screen
Hollywood came calling after Little Caesar. Burnett moved to California in 1930, beginning a second career that would bring him into contact with some of American cinema’s most recognizable names. His work reached the screen through adaptations of his novels and through screenplays he wrote himself.
Little Caesar (1931)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, Little Caesar gave Edward G. Robinson the role of Rico Bandello and helped establish the classic Hollywood gangster film. Burnett supplied the novel; the screen adaptation was written by Francis Edward Faragoh and Robert N. Lee. Rico now had a face and a voice that would become inseparable from his reputation.
Scarface (1932)
Burnett also contributed to the writing of Howard Hawks’s Scarface. Here, his involvement was in the screenplay: the source novel belonged to Armitage Trail. The film’s writing credits include Ben Hecht, John Lee Mahin, and Burnett, among others—a collaborative history easily obscured when the film is simply described as his work.
High Sierra (1941)
For High Sierra, Burnett worked with John Huston on the screenplay drawn from his own novel. Raoul Walsh directed, with Humphrey Bogart as Roy Earle and Ida Lupino as Marie. Bogart’s performance helped establish him as a major star.
The story proved adaptable beyond its original setting. Walsh returned to it as the western Colorado Territory (1949), while I Died a Thousand Times (1955) brought it back to crime drama with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
John Huston directed this adaptation, sharing screenplay credit with Ben Maddow. Sterling Hayden played Dix Handley, while Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, and James Whitmore helped give the criminal ensemble its distinctive personalities. A young Marilyn Monroe appeared as Angela Phinlay in an early role.
Burnett’s attention to the people behind the robbery gave the filmmakers unusually rich material: the specialists had lives and vulnerabilities before the camera ever reached them.
Beyond His Own Novels
Burnett’s screenwriting extended well beyond adaptations of his fiction. With Albert Maltz, he wrote This Gun for Hire (1942), adapted from Graham Greene’s novel and remembered for Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
His work also took him outside crime. Wake Island (1942), written with Frank Butler, earned the pair an Academy Award nomination for Original Screenplay. Two decades later, he shared screenplay credit with James Clavell on John Sturges’s The Great Escape (1963).
For readers discovering Burnett’s name, his film credits can produce a succession of familiar titles. They reveal how often his writing has already been part of an audience’s experience.
Case Closed
Perhaps “just life” was Burnett’s way of asking us to look a little longer. Beyond the gun, the scheme, or the criminal record, there is someone who wants recognition, remembers home, or believes the next opportunity will change everything. Understanding that desire offers no acquittal. It does, however, make it harder to dismiss the person.
Burnett knew the value of a well-planned robbery. He also knew that the people involved would never fit entirely inside the plan.
References
Books Consulted
- Baudou, Jacques, and Jean-Jacques Schleret, eds. Le Polar. Larousse, collection « Guide Totem ». Entry “Burnett,” signed Jean-Jacques Schleret, pp. 157–158.
- Bourdier, Jean. Histoire du roman policier. Éditions de Fallois, 1996. Especially pp. 200–202 and the chapter « Le noir franchit l’Atlantique ».
- Deleuse, Robert. Les Maîtres du roman policier. Bordas, collection « Les Compacts ». Entry “Burnett, William Riley,” pp. 74–75.
- Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Polity, 2005.
- Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. Routledge, 2005.
Online Sources
- Gallagher, Cullen. “‘Pretty Big Once’: W. R. Burnett’s Cynical Americana.” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 12, 2022. Includes excerpts from interviews with Burnett.
- Larsen, Michael J. “W. R. Burnett.” EBSCO Research Starters. Biographical and critical overview.
- “Books: U. S. Gangster.” TIME. Contemporary account of Burnett’s early writing and the success of Little Caesar.
- American Film Institute. AFI Catalog of Feature Films: entries for Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle, This Gun for Hire, and Wake Island.
- British Film Institute. The Great Escape (1963). Production and screenplay credits.
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The 15th Academy Awards, 1943. Original Screenplay nomination for Wake Island.
Quotation attribution: The opening quotation comes from Burnett’s interview with Ken Mate and Pat McGilligan, reproduced in Cullen Gallagher’s essay above.
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