The Noir thriller ----Page 3

Big-shot Gangsters and Small-time Crooks

Roy Earle, a gangster on the run in W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra (1940),
throws his newspaper down in disgust and launches into an indignant
tirade against society’s injustices. He assails a system that defines and
severely punishes John Dillinger as a criminal but does little to deter
the corrupt policeman, the banker who loses the depositors’ money in
the stock market, the judge who takes bribes to fix cases, the preacher
who gyps his congregation, or the big-shot official who sells jobs.
‘Why do people stand it?’ Earle demands. ‘A few guys have got all the
dough in this country. Millions of people ain’t got enough to eat. Not
because there ain’t no food, but because they got no money. Somebody
else has got it all’ (150-1). Even when their criminal protagonists do
not voice such forthright criticisms, the gangster-centred novels of the
time are implicitly concerned with the issues raised by Roy Earle
(himself a character whom Burnett based on Dillinger).¹ Gangster novels
repeatedly depict the cripplingly hierarchical nature of society, with its
divisions between the haves and the have-nots, and draw attention to
the similarity between apparently respectable businessmen and those
whom society defines as criminals. The mythologised gangster can only
be understood in relation to the wider society, whether he is cast as a
villain whose actions confirm the need for law and order or as an outlaw
hero admired for the toughness and energy with which he defies the
system.

The popular appeal of the American gangster figure during the thir-
ties was divided. Cinema audiences experienced the double satisfaction
of vicarious participation in gangster violence and of seeing violence
turned against the gangster himself. This enabled them, on the one
hand, to identify with criminal rebellion against a corrupt, hypocritical
society, and, on the other, to enjoy revenge fantasies against criminals

who  could  be  cast  as  ‘the  root  of  evil’.  The  Hollywood  gangster
story was conventionally placed in a retributive frame,² and the nega-
tive side of the gangster myth could be seen as the reinforcement of a
belief in the ‘public enemy’³ as an explanation of the collapse of moral-
ity, discipline and order in American society. This villainising of the
gangster is most apparent post-1935, when a ‘war against crime’ was
waged in vigilante and G-Men movies exempt (because of their law-and-
order bias) from the anti-violence provisions of the Hays Office pro-
duction code that had, by 1934, ‘all but outlawed the gangster movie’.⁴
A moralising frame is also sometimes to be seen in the crime novels of
the time, but it is more usual to find complex portrayals of gangsters
who are typed as representative rather than aberrant. From the late
twenties on, fictional American gangsters are no longer the crudely vili-
fied ‘defectives’ and physical monsters to be found in earlier represen-
tations (for example, in the films of Lon Chaney or in early 1920s
cartoons of grotesque, diminutive criminals skulking like creatures
apart). Nor are they drawn as the kind of psychopathic gangster later
epitomised by Ralph Cotter in Horace McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye
(1948), played by James Cagney as an unbalanced sadist in the 1950
film adaptation.⁵  The prewar British thrillers discussed in the final
section of this chapter associated gangsterism with fascism, and accord-
ingly tended to type the violent gangster as a dehumanised psychopath.
American gangsters of the period, however, are instead characterised by
their normality: ‘Criminals thought, looked, and, for the most part,
even acted like respectable Americans. The Saturday Evening Post sug-
gested the ordinariness of one criminal in the pseudonym it assigned
him: John Doe.’⁶

If the criminal is seen as essentially normal, then fictionalisations of
his career can act as wide-ranging critiques of American society and eco-
nomic structures. A high-profile gangster, like any man trying to live
out a public identity, poses the question of what drives such a man to
succeed and what qualities ultimately undermine his power. A strug-
gling, unsuccessful gangster is only another of the innumerable small
men who are put under pressure by (and have their characters deter-
mined by) hostile forces, whether bigger businessmen-gangsters or the
political establishment, or the two in league together. Sharing so much
common ground with respectable, law-abiding citizens but at the same
time functioning outside the law, the gangster serves both as a figure
admirable for his toughness and energy, defying an unjust system, and,
looked at from another angle, as a parallel in his activities to the crimi-
nality of supposedly honest society. He both collides with and replicates

this society’s legitimate structures. As the protagonist says in Benjamin Appel’s Brain Guy (1934), having lost his job in the Depression he has gone into crime ‘like a business man’: ‘It’s nothing. The world’s full of crooks, but some are called millionaires’ (157-8).

Many types of criminal, from the urban ethnic gangster to the poor
farm boy who has drifted into crime, acquire, in the Depression, cross-
class and cross-ethnic appeal.⁷  Both types become symbols of a rebel-
lion impossible for ordinary law-abiding citizens to enact. The heroic
rebel image was reinforced by the Hollywood versions of the myth, fea-
turing performances of great verve and energy. Movie gangsters such as
Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were heroes ‘of dynamic gesture’,
strutting, snarling and posturing, possessing a blatant, anarchic appeal.
Standing outside the law in a period when Depression America was
cynical about all sources of moral authority, they were ‘awe-inspiring .
..grand, even in death’.⁸ At the same time, however, they were a reflec-
tion of legitimate society. The criminal big shot, viewed in the distort-
ing mirror of the satirist, is a parody of the American dream of success,
ironising the business ethic by the illegality of his methods as well as
by his ultimate defeat. The fallen gangster or the small-time crook (really
just an average man trying to avoid ruin) figures the failures of laissez-
faire capitalism during years of great economic hardship. The inevitable
fall of the big-time gangster creates a sense of entrapment in an eco-
nomically determined reality. He is the victim of a society in which
everyone is corrupt: they are all ‘thieves like us’. The foundering crimi-
nal, like the law-abiding no-hoper, is the product of a faulty economic
system. As Burnett wrote, ‘if you have this type of society, it will produce
such men’.⁹  In looking at American examples of the criminal-centred
narratives written in the years between 1929 and the outbreak of World
War Two what we see is a range of strategies for challenging, mimick-
ing and reproaching a society that has ceased to operate in a legitimate
way, in which, as Roy Earle says, ‘somebody else has got it all’.

It is usual for film criticism to distinguish the classic gangster film
from film noir. Silver and Ward argue that there are fundamental dif-
ferences in narrative attitude. They see the glorification of the gangster
in early, Prohibition-era films such as The Underworld (von Sternberg,
1927) and The Racket (Lewis Milestone, 1928) as still present in the
‘demented idealism’ and egomania of Rico in Little Caesar (Mervyn
LeRoy, 1930) and Tommy Powers in Public Enemy (1931). This roman-
ticising is evident as well in the emphasis on action and the flamboy-
ant nature of the violence, with its staccato rhythms and blazing
machine-guns. Silver and Ward do concede, however, that gangster

films and films noirs also share iconic and narrative characteristics, and
that they can both be viewed as part of a larger, ‘underworld film’ phe-
nomenon,  with  slightly  later  gangster  films  like  Scarface (Howard

Hawks, 1932) closer to the dark mood, the ironies and the sense of claus-
trophobic entrapment that characterise noir.¹⁰ Other recent critics have
argued persuasively against seeing any sharp disjuncture. Most notably,
Jonathan Munby, in Public Enemies, Public Heroes, presents a strong case
for viewing film noir as a development of a ‘repressed but established
formula’. Noir, in this interpretation, is an infusion of modernist
stylistic attributes which enabled the earlier, ‘potentially seditious’

crime cycle to negotiate the censors.¹¹

The connections between ‘gangster’ and ‘noir’ thrillers are even more
apparent in fiction than film. For one thing, the kind of periodisation
familiar in film cycles does not operate in fiction to nearly the same
extent. There is also a quite different chronological relationship between
gangster novels and other types of crime story than there is between
gangster films and canonical film noir. Whereas, in looking at Holly-
wood films, we see a cycle of 1930s gangster films followed by the classic
cycle of films noirs that starts in the 1940s, there is no such divide in
the fiction of these decades. Several of the texts that formed the basis
of classic film noir (for example, Hammett’s Maltese Falcon; James M.
Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice) were written during the same
period (1929-34) that saw the production of the most famous gangster
films and the creation of such seminal gangster novels as Burnett’s Little
Caesar (1929), Armitage Trail’s Scarface (1930) and Paul Cain’s Fast One
(1932). Most of Chandler’s better-known novels, the other major novels
of James M. Cain and the early novels of Cornell Woolrich date from
the period (1939-44) when Burnett wrote High Sierra (1940) and Nobody
Lives Forever (1943). In looking at literary noir what one sees is the simul-
taneous development of investigative and criminal-centred thrillers,
with many common features and with modernist traits (for example,
subjective narration, the expression of existentialist anxiety and a sense
of claustrophobic entrapment) as evident in gangster novels as they are
in those narratives that became the basis for classic films noirs.

What is distinctive about the criminal-centred narratives discussed in
this chapter is that the perspective is located within organised crime. In
contrast to novels whose protagonists are ‘private’ criminals, the soli-
tary transgressors caught up in very personal tragedies who are the
subject of Chapter 3, these are stories involving some form of organised
crime, or at least involving more than one criminal, engaged in a struc-
tured criminal enterprise. They therefore tend to be directly concerned

with economic competition, the exercise of power and the dominance
of strong over weak interests. One of the features of ordinary criminal
life most thoroughly explored by fictional accounts of gangsters is
the development of elaborate hierarchies of authority.¹²  Conventional
society may try to consolidate its boundaries by defining and excluding
the gangster, but its divisions and its strategies of exclusion are in fact
reflected in a highly competitive underworld that has its own oppres-
sors and oppressed. Within criminal-centred narratives, tensions are
generated both by the gangster’s conflict with the larger society and by
the conflicts amongst the various levels of the criminal power structure,
with different types of novel corresponding to the level the protagonist
occupies in the hierarchy. Whereas an investigative figure like the Con-
tinental Op or Marlowe is primarily seen engaging in combat with the
corrupt powers-that-be, criminal protagonists, both large and small, are
competing within a well-defined pecking order. In investigative narra-
tives, irony emerges from the contrast between appearance and the
reality discovered in supposedly respectable society. The stories of gang-
ster protagonists additionally ironise the gaps between seeming success
and an inevitable fall, between aspiration and reality, and between
apparent and real destiny - powerful sources of irony in Depression
years, when the national sense of the discrepancy between dream and
reality was at its greatest.

It is sometimes said that the gangster does not himself suffer from a
hypocritical disjuncture between what he is and what he appears to be,
and that this sets him apart from the more ‘noirish’ criminal protago-
nist. This is much too sweeping a generalisation, particularly given the
historical movement of the gangster into legitimate business and politi-
cal activity. The representation of this process in fiction often centres
on the need for shifts in public image. Books like Paul Cain’s Fast One
(1932) and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942) are much
taken up with the need to suppress the publication of unwelcome truths
about the gangsterism of those in power. Other crime novels of the
period also concern themselves with the problem of public image,
whether encountered in the process of establishing one’s own image
(for example, in Little Caesar and Scarface) or in coping with the publi-
cation of journalistic vilifications (as in High Sierra and Thieves Like Us).
These are all novels that are in part about the self-publicising and the
public interpretation of the gangster and about the nature of the myth-
making. They explore the desire for legitimation and recognition on
the part of the gangster. Such desires make the gangster vulnerable
to the destabilisation of identity that afflicts the insecure, self-divided

protagonist of canonical film noir, with the gangster often suffering from a splitting of identity that is evident, for example, in his doomed efforts to acquire the trappings of social success (flash cars, stylish suits) and to achieve upward mobility.¹³

Gutter Macbeths

Benjamin Appel, many of whose stories were published in non-genre
magazines such as Esquire and Colliers, was one of crime writing’s
hardest-hitting social critics.¹⁴ His condensed version of the rise of gang-
sterism, a 1935 short story ironically titled ‘Movie of a Big Shot’, con-
cisely illustrates the way in which underworld activities could be used
to image the injustices and vicissitudes of American economic life, with
its illusions of upward mobility, its preoccupation with image-building
and its hierarchy of exploiters and exploited. Appel’s Hell’s Kitchen
stories of the late thirties¹⁵ all centre on the downtrodden and dispos-
sessed. Like Paul Cain’s ‘Parlor Trick’, Appel’s ‘Movie’ views the business
rivalries of powerful gangsters from the vantage point of a criminal who
is on one of the lower rungs of the organisation - not a Macbeth but
one of the Murderers, priding himself on his fierceness. In just a few
pages, Appel takes in the years from 1916 to the mid-1930s, creating a
protagonist, Franky, who is the embodiment of dogged and naive
aggression. He is the common man of crime, the sort of ‘prize dope’
with a head of ‘solid bone’ who would have been willing cannon-fodder
in World War One - anxious to enlist but encouraged instead, in the
parallel life of the underworld, to satisfy his patriotic aggression by
beating up ‘Dutchies’ and Jews (85-7). Franky’s potential is recognised
by one of the eventual gangland bosses, who values him for his physi-
cal toughness and makes him part of a gang which is given ‘a new lease
on life’ by Prohibition (89). Soon everybody ‘wallowed in money’.
Franky, however, with his strong-arm methods, is oblivious to the for-
tunes being made by the businessmen of the gang who control every-
thing. He is ‘the toughest guy in the world’, but he is not ‘the guy’
(90-4). Ironically, despite all his physical strength, he is a victim, fan-
cying himself admired by all in the role of a big shot but, with the
approach of repeal, needed less and less in a society in which crime has
established itself as ‘business first, last and always’ (95). Gangsters had
already, before the Crash of 1929, been seen as businessmen, and in the
years following the Crash they were portrayed as feeling the effects of
economic adversity like any other capitalist enterprise: ‘As a business,
crime was subject to general economic forces.’¹⁶  In these Depression

years, the business of crime has to cut down on shaky assets like Franky.
The story of the gangster struggling to consolidate his ill-gotten gains
and to move into legitimate society is, as we have seen, a story of the
desire ‘to be somebody’, and for Franky the fantasy of status achieved
is so powerful that he never guesses that he is on the skids, ‘practically
nobody now’ (97).

By taking a violent man too simple-minded to rise to anywhere near
the top, Appel makes his ‘Movie’ an exercise in counter-mythologising.
He presents the myth of the heroic gangster as a dream of success
beyond the grasp of most ordinary men. If the gangster saga is, as has
been argued, a version of the Horatio Alger myth, the career of a char-
acter like Franky suggests that in a time of economic catastrophe the
old ‘rags-to-riches’ narratives should be revealed for the sham they are.
By focusing on the delusions of a man who could never have been ‘des-
tined’ for greatness, Appel is revising the myth behind such novels as
Burnett’s Little Caesar and Trail’s Scarface, and the early thirties gangster
films based on them. In these narratives, the eponymous heroes, just
like their counterparts in respectable society, fulfil their destiny by
showing themselves able to achieve upward mobility, becoming the
apotheosis of a heroic and amoral capitalistic drive.

If the novels of W. R. Burnett were to be judged on the basis of their
influence, he ‘would undeniably be numbered amongst the most impor-
tant writers of his time’.¹⁷ Burnett saw himself as the writer most respon-
sible for the shift towards depicting crime from the point of view of the
criminal himself. Little Caesar was, he said, ‘the world seen through the
eyes of the gangster. It’s commonplace now, but it had never been done
before then. . . . The criminal was just some son-of-a-bitch who’d killed

somebody and then you go get ‘em.’¹⁸  Little Caesar stands at the start
of a period of fascination with the criminal’s own perspective, not only
in gangster narratives but in the other central noir roles of investigator
(as in the work of Whitfield and Paul Cain) and victim (the destitute
young outlaws of Thieves Like Us or the love triangle murderers of James

M. Cain’s novels). Written in 1929 and filmed in 1930, Little Caesar was
the most influential of the gangster sagas. It was imitated in dozens of
early thirties films and novels,¹⁹  amongst them Scarface by Armitage
Trail, who wanted Edward G. Robinson, star of Little Caesar, to play the
role of Scarface in the film adaptation. Like Tony Guarino in the Trail
novel, Burnett’s Rico (‘Little Caesar’) is obsessed with scaling the heights
of power. Burnett analyses at some length, as Trail does, the qualities
that enabled his hero to rise. In comparison to Trail, however, Burnett
gives closer attention to the flaws in his protagonist’s character that

bring about his downfall, a preoccupation which also distinguishes his novel from most gangster films. The dynamism caught on screen in the performances of Robinson, or Cagney in Public Enemy, is outweighed in a novel like Little Caesar by the flaws and insecurities that both motivate and finally bring down the gangster.

Burnett’s gangsters are driven by a sense of social inferiority and, in
the case of Little Caesar, by an overwhelming ambition that made him,
in Burnett’s eyes, akin to the heroes of tragedy, ‘a gutter Macbeth’.²⁰ As
the novel’s title suggests, the central theme is the parallel between the
gangster and the man of power. It is an analogy that works to ironise
the ‘great man’ in a way which was to become, for European writers like
Brecht and Greene, one of the more potent aspects of American gang-
land mythology. Rico is from the outset referred to as a ‘great man’,
which raises (as it does, for example, in Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild)
the question of what actually constitutes political ‘greatness’ in the
society being portrayed. In Burnett, in contrast both to European ver-
sions and to a purely satirical elaboration of the comparison, there is
pathos in the conception of Rico. Burnett probes his aspirations and
dreams. He lingers, for example, on Rico’s reverie whilst reading the
story of a rich society girl who seems ‘remote and unreal to him’ (44-5),
and he conveys Rico’s sense of wonderment at the way he is climbing
the ladder.

Rico has the illusion that he cannot be stopped, but under the con-
fident surface there is always a sense of isolation and despair. His meet-
ings with ‘bigger shots’ invariably make him feel anxiously inadequate.
Deliberately created as an unromantic figure, Rico is small, pale and
quiet, in contrast to ‘legendary’ figures who were outwardly more

impressive. Although in many respects Rico is the antithesis of the
‘impaired’ noir protagonist, Burnett’s study dwells, sympathetically
throughout, on the inner weaknesses that undermine his confident
masculine authority, especially his ‘dangerous’ lapses of drive and

energy (70-1, 84-5). Like many other noir protagonists, Rico associates
his vulnerable states with women and their ‘ability to relax a man, to
make him soft and slack’ (81-4). In spite of his role in organising and
manipulating others, he is in key respects isolated. As he struggles to
consolidate his power, Rico begins to weaken physically and to suffer
increasingly from self-doubt: ‘He was nobody, nobody. Worse than
nobody’ (132). Forced into exile, hiding out with men who do not know
his true identity, Rico cannot bear his insignificance and suffers alien-
ation as ‘a lonely Youngstown yegg in a hostile city without friends or
influence’ (141). Like Scarface, Little Caesar moves towards an end in

which irony derives from the contradictions within the protagonist’s identity. Rico must hide all knowledge of his past in order to survive, but it is this past that he longs to reassert and, in the end, he is psychologically unable to resist resuming his old identity. His urge to have people know his ‘real’ (recognisable) identity is his undoing, and the novel ends with Rico seeing the death of the public self he has so carefully created: ‘“is this the end of Rico?”’ (158).

The historical figure who most influenced the conception of the big-
time gangster was, of course, Al Capone, who had by the end of the
1920s  become  the  symbol  of  American  gangsterism.  Capone  was
accepted as ‘a force in American life that government was powerless to
control’, his phenomenal rise to power in Chicago’s underworld having
made him not only feared and hugely wealthy but a substantial politi-
cal influence and an example of how a gangster could make a business
asset of his reputation.²¹ Burnett’s Little Caesar was partly modelled on
Capone, but the most famous fictionalisation of his career was undoubt-
edly Trail’s Scarface, in which Tony Guarino, the Capone figure, is both
protagonist and scapegoat.

Armitage Trail (the pseudonym of Maurice Coons, who had been a
detective-story  and  Hollywood  script  writer)  immersed  himself  in
Chicago’s gangland whilst he was writing, researching the book by get-
ting to know Sicilian gangsters. But he also stood back from his material,
incorporating numerous passages designed to establish a normative
moral perspective and insisting that, as an exemplary figure, the gang-
ster supplies a cautionary tale rather than a glamorous role model.²²
From his opening descriptions to the moralising end of the novel, Trail
presents the celebrated career of Scarface as a rebuke to the society that
produced him and a lesson that will help in the restoration of decent
government. Before he dies, moved by ‘the social impulse’, Tony
Guarino writes a ‘damning indictment’ of the system of which he has
been a part, and the publication of this indictment ultimately leads to
‘a complete reorganisation of the government and police administra-
tion’ (177-8). It is significant that it is Scarface himself who is given the
‘great vision’ of the corrupt system that has facilitated his rise and of
the amoral, treacherous man who has been created (170). Nor is this
entirely out of character, since it is his insights into the nature of power
that have enabled him to attain dominance in the first place. What dif-
ferentiates the big-time gangster from other noir protagonists is this skill
as a political manipulator. Scarface is not altogether dissimilar to the
private eye. Like the archetypal hard-boiled investigator, he is separated
from his past and his family. He has a sense of chivalry and pride in

keeping his word, and he possesses as well a vitality and masculine com-
petence that set him apart from the small-scale, defeatist, unheroic noir
transgressor. What most distinguishes him from other noir protagonists,
heroes and anti-heroes alike, is his drive for power, sustained by a com-
bination of efficient violence and efficient business. Contrasted with an
old prewar ‘strong-arm’ type, Tony is a dapper, efficient, postwar gang-
ster who goes in for ‘regular business administration in crime’ and who
ultimately feels ‘like many another millionaire’ that success is easily
achieved if you are not too squeamish (74-5, 147-8).

Like Appel’s ‘Movie’, the story of Scarface charts a series of develop-
ments that start before the First World War. Tony’s first killing is just
before the war, at a time before violence was a natural recourse in gang-
land, and the actual war forges his character, not only confirming his
qualities as a leader but earning him medals for the art of murder.
Although violence is only one of the means necessary for the achieve-
ment of his political ends, warfare is a dominant image in Scarface, and
the scar itself takes on symbolic importance, constituting his new iden-
tity (since ‘Tony Guarino’ is reported as killed in action). It is his curse
as well as his destiny, and, together with his gun, it signifies the
inescapability of violence. He is ‘a marked man’, and the scar leaves him
unrecognisable to the family he was close to in earlier life, so guaran-
teeing his separation from the past and from warm humanity. The noir
identity crisis dominates the end of the novel as it does Little Caesar,
except that here it is the protagonist’s human rather than his public
identity that is fatal to him. Scarface must confront his own brother, a
policeman, and the question is whether his past or his present identity
will prevail. He dies at the moment when his past (his human identity)
resurfaces in his mind and stops him from using the gun that has con-
stituted his male authority as a gangster. The end is brought about by
his knowing more than ‘respectable society’ knows. Decent folk like his
brother cannot see him for who he is, whereas he ‘knows’ them and,
like Conrad’s Marlow at the end of Heart of Darkness, he keeps the truth
from them. He has previously hidden from his mother, for example,
knowledge of events that would kill her and of the real nature of the
society that has recreated her son as Scarface: ‘What a blessing it was
that most people actually knew so little’ (155).

Also-rans, has-beens and other losers

The ‘tragic hero’ potential of the protagonists of rise-and-fall gangster
sagas is harder to discern in the more unequivocally noir stories of crimi-

nals who never make it to the top, or of once successful men whose last
vestiges of power are eroded by time and exhaustion. Marginalised in
the competition for wealth and position, such characters provide writers
with the underdog’s perspective on hierarchy. Paul Cain’s Fast One and
James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit are both structured around
underworld struggles for ascendancy. They focus on attempts to seize
power on the part of men who aspire to be political manipulators but
whose flaws of character and errors of judgement bring them down long
before they can consolidate their power. In such narratives, ambition is
a driving force, and the protagonists, like Rico and Scarface, embody the
capitalist obsession with success. During the course of their ill-fated
campaigns, however, they never quite cease to be victims. In other
thrillers of the period (for example, in the work of Appel, Anderson and
Hemingway, and in the early forties novels of Burnett) protagonists are
not clawing their way to the top but are in the main just struggling to
survive. It is in novels like these that we see the strongest protests of
the little man against the whole of the social and economic structure
and the clearest assertions of economic determinism - of deprivation as
a form of noir fatality.

Paul Cain’s Fast One, one of the most brutal and compelling of the
unheroic gangster novels, was originally written, starting in March
1932, for Black Mask. Cain’s first piece of fiction and his only novel, Fast
One is the ultimate expression of Chandler’s half-jesting suggestion that
hard-boiled writers use the simple expedient of having a man come
through the door with a gun whenever the action threatens to flag. Fol-
lowed faithfully, the method produces an image of a savage and random
universe. In fact, the fluctuating fortunes that determine the rhythms
of the gangster saga change with such relentless speed in Cain’s novel
that it has sometimes been seen as a parody. Although this is clearly far
from being Cain’s only purpose, Fast One does foreground some of the
more easily parodied qualities of hard-boiled fiction, and the title itself
has a distinct air of generic knowingness. It refers to the novel’s coun-
tless lies and multiple betrayals (pulling a fast one) and to Kells’

(kills) speed as a gunman and his sudden rise to a temporary position
of strength. It also, however, seems intended to refer to the novel
itself: that is, of all the hard-boiled thrillers, this is indeed the ‘fast
one’, moving so rapidly that the reader has barely had time to adjust to
one turn of events before another incident propels the story in a new
direction.

The dizzying complexity of the betrayals and the randomness of the
unanticipated deaths in Fast One make the effects achieved hypnotic

and surreal. Violence is presented in a manner that is so laconic it is like
some bizarre accident glimpsed from the corner of the eye whilst speed-
ing past. The protagonist, Gerry Kells (assuming, in a novel abounding
with false narratives, that his own story of his life is a reliable one), has
a background of war, drug addiction and criminal convictions (40).
Partly because of the proliferation of dishonest narratives, characterisa-
tion of Kells and others is minimal, leaving readers sure only that duplic-
ity and toughness are fairly evenly shared around. What Cain does is
to involve the ‘rise to power’ plot of the earlier gangster novel with pat-
terns more closely associated with other types of protagonist, that is,
with the pursued, wrongly accused victim and the investigator whose
negotiating position and indeed survival depend on his ability to find
out what is actually going on. The opening pages quickly take Kells
through the ‘reluctant participant’ and ‘wrong man’ plot possibilities.
Although he says at the outset that he does not ‘want to be a part of
anything’ (4), he is soon a wanted man, and continues to be, in part
wrongly, pursued by the police throughout. His behaviour becomes
increasingly ‘mad’, in the sense of stop-at-nothing vengefulness. We
sympathise with him, but he is in many ways a very disturbing figure,
used to embody the capacity of violence to destabilise: ‘a kind of soft
insanity came into his eyes’; ‘the grin was a terrible thing on his bloody
face’ (22-3). Having ‘helped eliminate a lot of small fry’, Kells survives
sundry attempts on his own life (100-4, 110), only to meet an end in
darkness, pain and loss that is one of the most pointedly grim of any
noir protagonist, with the rain, the torn body and the broken earth
suggesting that an elemental violence has claimed him.

Love’s Lovely Counterfeit was James M. Cain’s only novel with a
strongly explicit political dimension. Like Fast One, it has a plot cen-
tring on the revelation of damaging information about political figures

- information that will demonstrate to the public the extent of politi-
cal corruption in the city, revealing the ‘alliance between crime, the
mayor, and the police’ (22). The novel is set in an ‘imaginary metropo-
lis’, like Hammett’s Personville a representative American city. The pro-
tagonist, Ben Grace, is basically a non-violent man who defines himself
as ‘just in between’ a chiseller and a crook (17) and who tries to gain
ascendancy by cleverness and control of information. He is also used as
an example of power corrupting. When scandal surfaces and the bigger
crooks leave town, Grace is opportunistic and unscrupulous enough to
see his own chance to wield some power and, as he makes his move,
his whole manner changes. There is a pretence of cleaning up the city,
but in reality Grace has become ‘callous, calm and cold’ (77). He devel-

ops skills at bullying, recognising that ‘a big operator, he runs it or he
don’t operate’ (101), but at the end of the day, his identity has not been
sufficiently transformed and he is not quite corrupt enough to make a
go of it.

Many other crime stories of the thirties and early forties share this
plot dynamic, moving towards the eventual or rapid self-destruction of
flawed characters engaged in a criminal journey along the American
‘road to success’. In Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, the protagonist is moti-
vated initially by the wish to extricate himself from a menial job with
a notorious racketeer, and the ‘big man’s’ refusal to release him gener-
ates the characteristic Depression-era sense of entrapment by circum-
stances that cannot be altered. As so often in James M. Cain stories,
actions perversely produce the opposite of the desired effect, with
Grace’s drive to free himself and to attain some form of financial auton-
omy leading only to his death.

This ironic pattern is also evident in Benjamin Appel’s Hell’s Kitchen
stories, which generally centre on the ill-fated ambitions of vulnerable,
poverty-stricken young criminals. Appel carefully establishes the normal
humanity of the ‘suckers’ he portrays. They are all mother’s sons. This
does not have the Oedipal implications that it might have in later noir,
but instead serves only to place his protagonists firmly in a social and
human context. Appel plays with perspective in order to challenge
dehumanising stereotypes of criminals, so that even the one vaguely
psychopathic character he includes, a murderous young thug in a story
called ‘Oh, Mother . . .’, dies murmuring ‘“Mama, mama . . .”’ (41). As
Hammett does in Red Harvest, but from the opposite side of the conflict
and more sentimentally, Appel subverts the distinction between the
hunter and the hunted. The detective in ‘Oh, Mother . . .’ hunts ‘this
killer who was hunting him’; both are, at a moment of total isolation,
thinking of their families, and as the detective listens to the boy’s voice,
he suddenly himself feels ‘utterly lonely, as if he also lay dying’ (40-1).
More often the stories involve protagonists who are driven by hardship
into a world of organised crime where they are remorselessly destroyed.
In ‘Crazy Kid’, the kid thinks he can ‘hijack himself into being a big-
shot’ but is swiftly executed by the gangsters he holds up (83); in ‘Ask
Anybody’, the good-natured Bittsy, failing to find any work, agrees to
be the driver in a hold-up planned by two other boys, and the story
ends with Bittsy’s mother protesting that ‘“My boy is a good boy. It isn’t
right he should be killed in the chair”’ (133). In his Dock Walloper stories
as well,²³ Appel writes movingly about the loss of human dignity forced
on his characters by necessity and human cruelty. The bum in ‘Night

Court Monologue’, deprived of his human identity, wants only to be
acknowledged as a man, but is worn down by the indifference or con-
tempt of everyone he encounters: ‘it was no use thinking I was a man
when all of them said I wasn’t’ (125). These are essentially stories of the
Depression, insisting on a recognition that fate is economically deter-
mined, and driving home the human cost. As the rich kid narrating ‘Red
Mike, Mabel and Me’ comes to understand the perspective of Red and
Mabel he, too, sees that ‘Things happen. And that’s all. The poor guy.
No luck, no breaks’ (Hell’s Kitchen, 62). Appel reiterates his ‘there but
for the grace of God’ theme as a challenge to the categorisation of the
criminal as other. Whereas the ‘big shot’ like Rico or Scarface enjoys his
short-lived heroic moment when he seems to have achieved the Amer-
ican dream of success and power, the career of the small-time crook
embodies the impotence of the ordinary man trapped at the bottom of
the system.

One of the novels of the late thirties in which this harshly deter-
ministic economic fate is most effectively used to structure a crime story
is Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, published in 1937 and adapted for
the cinema by Nicholas Ray in 1948 as They Live by Night and by Robert
Altman (as Thieves Like Us) in 1973. Like Appel, Anderson pays close
attention to the social origins of crime and uses the small-time crook as
the measure of ‘respectable’ society - of its criminality, its want of
humanity, and its failure to recognise that this society itself is consti-
tuted by ‘thieves like us’. These are characters destined to be fleeced not
only by respectable society but by the bigger crooks as well, an emblem
of the defeat of the decent small man. The choice of bank robbers as
protagonists is, in the context of the time, a way of generating sympa-
thy, since hostility towards banks, which were often blamed for the
Depression, was widespread in the 1930s.²⁴ The bungling young crooks
are used throughout to provide a perspective on the economic dispari-
ties that produce crime. Anderson underscores the irony of the poor
allowing themselves to be persuaded that small-time criminals are
deserving of punishment in a system in which ‘the great criminals’
never go to prison at all (341-2). His protagonists are products not of
urban squalor but of the rural dust bowl: in Bowie’s description of his
‘people’, for example, we see him as ‘just a big old country boy’ who
has found that a gun is necessary just ‘to make a piece of money’ (233).
But there is little nostalgia for the old rural America, except perhaps as
it is embodied in the moral natures of the protagonists themselves. They
are motivated by a combination of altruism and by a simple wish to
have some semblance of the good life, such as the house, home cooking

and little luxuries that they experience when they are briefly in ‘Clear
Waters’ (273). As in Appel’s ‘Movie’, there is an ironic miscasting of the
small-time criminal by the newspapers. Bowie and his girlfriend Keechie
dream of getting away somewhere and forgetting about ‘Bowie Bowers’,
a fantasy of escape in which there would ultimately just be ‘the real
Bowie Bowers’ (301-3), the man submerged by the myth of the gang-
ster created by a hostile world.

In the same year that Anderson published Thieves Like Us, Ernest Hem-
ingway produced To Have and Have Not. Himself an influence on the
hard-boiled style, Hemingway also wrote the short story that was the
basis of one of the quintessential films noirs, Robert Siodmak’s The
Killers (1946). To Have and Have Not, however, was his closest approxi-
mation to the hard-boiled thriller. The strong relationship between
small-time crook narratives and more mainstream thirties literature of
social criticism is very evident in Hemingway’s adaptation of the genre.
Harry Jordan is another ordinary man, older and endowed with more
Hemingway-style toughness than Anderson’s thieves, but equally a
victim of an unjust economic system. His life is a constant reminder of
the central thematic contrast between the immunity of the rich and the
persecution of the poor. As in Anderson, economic circumstances are
presented as fate. Harry reflects, ‘I don’t want to fool with it but what
choice have I got? They don’t give you any choice now’ (75). Also as in
Anderson, his indignation is sentimentalised by his genuine love of his
wife and by having a needy family, and his crimes are put into per-
spective by representations of the destructive criminality of the upper
classes. There is the old grain broker, for example, worrying about the
Inland Revenue investigators and incapable of remorse or pity for those
he had ruined, who jumped to their deaths or shot themselves with
‘those admirable American instruments . . . so well designed to end the
American dream when it becomes a nightmare’ (167). Harry is an inde-
pendent operator rather than a gang member, but, driven by want into
illegal activity, he forms temporary alliances and takes on questionable
and dangerous customers, running liquor and smuggling aliens to earn
enough to keep body and soul together. His loss of an arm, coupled with
his inability to have sons and his inability to earn anything, make him
feel less than a man, but, particularly in comparison to those who
engage in pseudo-intellectual parlour politics, he has a fund of stoical
and manly strength. Though he is ‘no radical’ (60-9), his mute suffer-
ing and the touching simplicity of his final inchoate ramblings as he
lies dying are meant to stand as a radical protest: ‘No matter how a man
alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance’ (158).

Burnett’s fiction of the early forties creates a very similar image of the
criminal in relation to society. Transgressions are explained by reference
to social and economic circumstance, and ordinary men are shown
being villainised by a press that never exposes bankers and financial
manipulators as ‘real criminals’. High Sierra (1940) and Nobody Lives
Forever (1943) are, like To Have and Have Not, novels of middle age rather
than youth, with protagonists who are not battling for ascendancy or
doomed to remain at the bottom but who have already had a measure
of success in the criminal world and are now entering a period of
decline. Burnett turns from the myth of the rapid rise and sudden cata-
strophic fall of the ambitious gangster, which perhaps had its greatest
resonance at the time of the Crash and its immediate aftermath. Instead,
these are novels of exhaustion: protagonists are worn down by years of
struggle and poverty and filled with nostalgia for commonplace life at
a time when they no longer have the energy to hope for the success of
the ‘big-time’. The nostalgia for a vanished American dream of oppor-
tunity and peaceful sufficiency is explored, but as a sustaining myth
rather than a lost reality: ‘the morning of the world, a true Golden Age’
remembered by an early twentieth-century farm boy, is contrasted with
the struggles of a middle-aged man headed towards ‘an ambiguous
destiny in the Far West’ (5). As he experiences the bitterness and moral
ambiguity of the present, Roy Earle comes to realise his mistake in think-
ing that there was ever a past that constituted a ‘good place’. Roy’s
appearance is that of the archetypal tough guy, but he is in fundamen-
tal ways an innocent, possessing warm human impulses.²⁵ Burnett jux-
taposes Roy’s character with that of the crook as capitalist exploiter (‘Big
Mac’, bossing and buying him) and confronts him with the class unfair-
ness of Tropico Springs, the goal of the robbery and a ‘dream-oasis’ of
riches and leisure. Roy refuses to be a ‘chump’ who lets the big guys
push him around (60), and his self-assertion is an implicit form of social
protest.

Death, old age and fear of confinement also haunt Nobody Lives
Forever, another novel that assimilates a strong sense of social injustice
to a more cosmic sense of human absurdity. Four ‘hungry guys’, all ‘has-
beens’ (157, 71), plan a con that is doomed to fail. At the same time it
leads the ‘big guy’, Jim, to experience a transforming sense of human
responsibility. Burnett reinforces his central theme by including a gang-
ster who reads Shakespeare and also by inserting the story of Tom
Rodney, another ‘aged king’ figure, admired and envied, but meeting a
cautionary end of the ‘paths of glory lead but to the grave variety’.
Rodney had seemed to Jim, as a boy, all-powerful, a dream of greatness

who ‘owned the world’. At the finish, however, he is ‘a filthy, stinking
old man’, becoming the central figure in the nightmares in which Jim
envisions himself becoming a figure of scorn, old, alienated and alone
(28-9).

Britain’s armless bandits

The essential normality of the protagonist in Burnett’s Nobody Lives
Forever is confirmed by the presence of a character called Doc, the gang-
ster as psychopath. Doc is a twisted, deformed schemer who feels
menaced by ‘the dark future’; he is a man of no principle and a viola-
tor of the criminal code of honour. Doc cherishes images of destruction,
hoping the Jap bombers will ‘blast the hell’ out of Los Angeles and
declaring that he would ‘split with Hitler if I couldn’t work it any other
way’ (65, 17). The kind of division one sees here, between an essentially
non-violent man like Jim and the twisted, violent psychopath, was a
crucial one for British thriller-writers of the late thirties and early forties.
Unlike their American counterparts, British writers like Graham Greene
and Eric Ambler were never inclined to give a sympathetic role to the
armed gangster and were much more likely to class any violent crimi-
nal as a psychopath, the man excluded from the human community.
There was a deep-rooted sense that criminality and violence were inher-
ently un-British. In comparison to America, with its more visible urban
crime and its Prohibition gangsterism, British criminals were decidedly
low profile, providing little material for a romanticised gangster mythol-
ogy. Involved mainly in activities like protection, racecourse racketeer-
ing and street-betting, they were not known for shootings and machine
gun battles, tending instead to sort out their quarrels with chivs, knives
and bottles. It was only in the 1940s, after taking advantage of wartime
opportunities for organising rationing, gambling and prostitution, that
‘spivs and racketeers entered the public consciousness and . . . began to
appear in films and novels’.²⁶  There are some notable crime-centred
British novels written before 1945, but criminals who are largely sym-
pathetic are also unarmed and undangerous, and violent psychopaths
are distinctly un-British. Most often, in fact, they are the kind of men
who would unhesitatingly ‘split with Hitler’.

Passing references to Hitler aside,²⁷  the main political thrust of the
American gangster novel during this period is domestic. In England and
often also in continental Europe, on the other hand, the ‘great man’ as
‘great gangster’ analogy was recurrently related to the rise of fascism. In
Germany such comparisons were quickly suppressed. Banned without

delay after the Nazi take-over, Fritz Lang’s Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)
was made, according to Lang, ‘as an allegory to show Hitler’s processes
of terrorism’ by putting Nazi slogans, doctrines and paranoid ambitions
into the mouths of criminals.²⁸  Brecht, in Arturo Ui, cast a comically
deromanticised gangster as a man of power, but again this was clearly
not a work likely to find favour in Nazi Germany. Written in 1941 but
not performed for nearly two decades (1958), Brecht’s ‘parable play’
satirises Hitler’s rise to power as the take-over of a Chicago gangster, ‘the
biggest gangster of all times’ following ‘the call of destiny’, securing
peace with machine guns and rubber truncheons (8, 95). For British
writers of this period, living in a country dominated by the fear of an
impending war, violence was not generally admitted as an understand-
able response to economic deprivation and powerlessness. Instead,
there was the nightmare image of the ‘civilised normality’ of England
menaced by the unnatural monstrosity of fascist violence.

As is apparent in Orwell’s response to James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids
for Miss Blandish, in the context of the late thirties, even the non-
political representation of the psychopathic gangster tends to be read
in relation to continental political violence. Chase’s novel struck Orwell
as a debased American import that unwittingly expressed the moral
atmosphere of fascism. Immensely popular, selling over a million copies
in the first five years,²⁹ No Orchids was adapted first for the theatre and
then for the cinema (by St John L. Clowes in 1948). The film raised an
outcry both because of its obvious debt to American gangster films and
because of its sex, perversion and sadism. ³⁰ The most obvious influence
on Chase’s conception was Popeye in Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), with
his jerking hat and ‘vicious cringing’ look, a misbegotten, impotent
embodiment of pathological violence quite unlike the very human
criminals of most American thrillers of the thirties and early forties. In
popular film and fiction, there were (as in the character of Doc in Nobody
Lives Forever) minor psychopathic characters lurking at the margins, but
the ‘psychologising’ of the gangster-protagonist is mainly, in the United
States, a postwar phenomenon, evident in such Cagney films as White
Heat (1949) and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. In No Orchids, the violent gang-
ster, Slim, is a mother-dominated psychopath comparable to Cagney in
White Heat, but without any of the romantic rebel overtones. He is an
‘idiot’ who is ‘mean and bad right through’. The explanation of his
having a background ‘typical’ for a ‘pathological killer’ (28) bears more
than a passing similarity to Popeye’s profile. The descriptions of Slim in
the act of killing are used to evoke horror. As his idiot mask slips to
reveal the killer, the reader is told that he feels ‘the same odd ecstasy’

he always felt when killing (34). The social critique implicit in Chase’s
novel is quite different from that in the American gangster novels we
have examined. Slim is not a product of his society but, like any threat-
ening external force, he is a test of its resolve. Whereas American writers
of the time use the rise of the gangster and his violent aggression as an
analogue for the ambitious careers of those at the top, Chase presents
Slim as a perverted and monstrous creature who is dangerous because
modern ‘good time’ society lacks the moral fibre to stand against him.
As Miss Blandish says of being held in captivity by Slim, ‘I’m a person
without  any  background,  any  character  or  any  faith . . . I  haven’t
believed in anything except having a good time’ (155-6).

Writers of more ‘serious’ thrillers than those of Chase used the figure
of the gangster to engage explicitly with the political dangers and ten-
sions of the late thirties. Graham Greene, in particular, uses psychotic,
dehumanised criminal types to image the extremity of brutally aggres-
sive behaviour.³¹ In Gun for Sale (1936) and Brighton Rock (1938) Greene
associates violence with those who are on the margins of society, liter-
ally and symbolically homeless and untutored in English decency and
‘respectability’. Both Raven and Pinkie are characterised as immature.
They  do  not  possess  the  kind  of  redeeming  innocence  of,  say,
Anderson’s young outlaws but are distorted personalities, born to vio-
lence and ‘doomed to be juvenile’,³² and thus beyond all possibility of
growth or change. In Gun for Sale, Raven’s name, his background and
his physical appearance all mark him out as wholly other. He is less than
human, with his harelip, his ugliness, his ‘bitter screwed-up figure’, his
inner coldness and his failed sexuality (5). Greene does include in the
novel two caricatured figures (Major Calkin and Buddy Fergusson)
whose behaviour suggests the presence within Britain of the home-
grown masculine aggression traditionally associated with the sensa-
tional thriller and adventure story. But whereas these men are linked to
fantasy violence, Raven is the thing itself. He is an abomination
metaphorically paired with his gun, ‘dark and thin and made for
destruction’ (13).

An altogether more complex character, Pinkie is explained in both
socio-economic and theological terms. He possesses a viciousness that
is a consequence of social injustice and exploitation but is also a central
actor in Greene’s drama of good and evil. Having begun with the inten-
tion of producing a crime story, Greene shifted the novel towards a the-
ological vision that required a conception of evil going far beyond
a socially conditioned corruption of values, and the fact that he was
able to incorporate the young gangster in such a vision suggests how

completely he had detached his violent criminal from human normal-
ity. Pinkie, like Scarface, is scarred, but in his case the scarring is not
simply the mark of initiation into the world’s violent realities but part
of a cluster of physical and psychological traits that conventionally dis-
tinguish the dehumanised villain. Again, what we see is a stunted ap-
pearance, sexual abnormality and a diseased pathological violence
manifested in minutely detailed sadism. These are the signs that ensure
Pinkie’s ‘capacity for damnation’ but also, on a more secular level, make
it natural for Greene to relate his gangland aspirations to continental
political threats. The power Pinkie wants for himself is that wielded by
Colleoni, boss of ‘the great racket’, whose expansive gestures map ‘the
World as Mr Colleoni visualised it’. Pinkie, challenging his power, is
imaged as ‘a young dictator’ of unlimited ambition, his breast aching
‘with the effort to enclose the whole world’ (132-5).

The psychopathic gangster/fascist continued to make appearances in
British crime fiction after the war as well, in, for example, Gerald Kersh’s
Prelude to a Certain Midnight. Written in 1947 but set in the mid-1930s,
Kersh’s Prelude contains a character, until the end identified simply as
‘the Murderer’, who fantasises about worshipping or being an ‘Ideal
Man - the Leader’ and reflects that ‘Good must be pitiless . . . and
although it was not expedient to say so, he saw Herr Hitler’s point.
The pure man must be strong . . .’ (119-20). The point behind such a
comparison is not dissimilar to the one that Chase makes in passing
in No Orchids. That is, the Murderer is moving through a society too
weakened in its resolve to resist fascist atrocities: ‘“Yet is it not a fact
that in Germany Hitler has been in power for over two years. . . . And

are you up in arms? No! You recognise Hitler, you honour Hitler . . .”’
(149-50).

In novels that separated crime from violence, it was much easier for
British writers to convey a sense of the criminal’s own humanity and
status as a victim, and of his wrongdoing as the product of hardship
and of a brutalising environment. Some of the most striking examples
are to be found in the work of James Curtis, an actively left-wing writer
who was involved with both communist and socialist movements in
the 1930s.³³  Curtis often uses characters who have just been released
from or broken out of jail, for example in The Gilt Kid (1936) and Look
Long upon a Monkey (1956). In They Drive by Night (1938),³⁴  Shorty,
another small-time crook just out of jail, is suspected of a murder of
which he is innocent. Chapters in which we share his perspective are
interspersed with chapters in which we enter the mind of the actual
murderer, an anonymous man in a shabby raincoat who has killed the

girl Shorty is thought to have murdered. Shorty’s traumatic experiences
bring him to reflect repeatedly on the deprivations that grind down the
ordinary man or woman and on official indifference and callousness:
when she was alive, ‘they hadn’t bloody well bothered their heads’
about the ‘poor kid’ who was murdered, except to arrest her for solicit-
ing. Shorty himself, downtrodden, hounded and ‘messed and bitched
about from pillar to bloody post’, feels his kinship with the rest of
society’s victims: ‘It was a bastard all ways up. . . . Blokes worked and

what did they get? Nothing but bloody misery . . .’ (83, 38-9). The mur-
derer on the prowl, however, thinks only of himself and his own isola-
tion from a society he despises, in reveries that act to confirm his
madness rather than lending him the tragic dignity of Burnett’s Little
Caesar.

Less wholeheartedly sympathetic with the petty criminal, Gerald
Kersh, in Night and the City (1938), nevertheless presents his wide-boy
protagonist as an entirely human character. Adapted for the cinema in
1950 by Jules Dassin, Night and the City is one of two British-set ‘spiv
movies’ of the period in which the spiv is the central character (the
other is John Boulting’s 1947 film of Brighton Rock).³⁵  Harry Fabian is
some distance from Curtis’s romanticised small man, but however sleazy
he is, we are not moved to outright condemnation, in part because he
so utterly fails to match up to his fantasies about having connections
with the famous gangsters of the American underworld. Like Appel,
Kersh uses the small-time crook’s unsuccessful imitation of the mythol-
ogised gangster to make a point about the ways in which social condi-
tions circumscribe most human ambitions. But in contrast to Appel and
other left-wing writers of the Depression (including Curtis), Kersh rep-
resents his unfortunate protagonists as choosing their lots and indeed
as inviting the fates that befall them. Fabian has elected to inhabit ‘the
shifting frontier between the slough of small business and the quagmire
of the underworld’ (51-2), and Kersh deliberately counters a socially
deterministic explanation of his criminal activity by having Fabian’s
own brother, Bert, revealed to us at the end of the novel as the salt of
the English earth. A good-hearted, hard-working Cockney costermon-
ger, Bert provides a chorus-like commentary on Harry Fabian’s scummy
activities, and Kersh’s addresses to the reader underscore the irony of a
man like Harry, who ‘could have devoted such keenness, such perse-
verance, and such energy to something legitimate’, instead becoming ‘a
creature of the gutters, sniffing after a trail along the dank and shadowy
roads of the night, hunting somebody down’ (27).

The satirical nature of Kersh’s writing is strongly marked, but the satire

is directed against the human types portrayed. A grotesquely distorted
society is cast less as the cause of crime than as its punishment. In place
of the mythic gangster-hero or psychopathic monster of violence, Kersh
creates human examples of moral disintegration who are condemned
to drift in ‘silent putrefaction’ in the ‘nightmare-land’ of a London land-
scape of surreal and hellish degradation, epitomised in Bagrag’s Cellar,
a place into which daylight never penetrates, ‘on the bottom of life . . .
the penultimate resting place of the inevitably damned’ (31, 114). In
the Dassin film of Night and the City, this entrapping underworld is so
powerfully established that Fabian himself becomes a somewhat more
sympathetic figure. The imprisoning buildings, dark alleyways and
threatening shadows give the audience an overwhelming sense of the
protagonist’s own view of his environment, and the desperation and
despair of the noir protagonist are evident throughout in Richard
Widmark’s performance as Fabian. The film adds, at the very end, one
unselfish gesture (his insistence that Mary claim the price on his head)
that gives him something of the pathos of the doomed figure of the
American gangster. Even in the opening sequence, when Widmark’s
Fabian pauses for breath after having been pursued through the London
streets, he is metaphorically in the position that characterises the com-
passionately viewed criminal protagonist, ‘caught halfway, transfixed
between top and bottom and trying to catch his breath’.³⁶