Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.1.6 William Riley Burnett
Another novelist from the tough-guy school of writing is William Riley Burnett
(1899-1982). When hired by Captain Shaw, he was instructed - just like the others - to
provide “simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief.” Also, as mentioned
above, Captain Shaw would take Hammett as his exemplar, and thus would want his
writers to emphasise action, but only when it involved characterisation. In terms of theme,
Burnett was closer to Dashiell Hammett or even James M. Cain, but his originality came
from the fact that his characters would be pining for a better world, away from the
corrupted and vicious city, but rarely, if ever, succeeding in finding it, and falling back into
the tentacles of a life of criminality and dishonesty.
Burnett’s first novel was Little Caesar (1929) which was then turned into a hit
gangster film by Mervin LeRoy for Warner Brothers, and is still considered today as the
film that opened the prototypical gangster saga, as I shall discuss in the next chapter. Both
the novel and the film tell the story of the rise and fall of Rico Caesare Bandella (Edward
G. Robinson in the film). The novel inspired many other writers and Hollywood
filmmakers like John Huston, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray to further develop the
gangster film genre. The language used in the film was also very hard-boiled, something so
newly coarse and brisk that the British publishers of Burnett’s novel were confused by the
language and so they had to include a three-page glossary at the end with the first edition.
Burnett explains that:
This was in the twenties. Novels were all written in a certain way, with literary
language and so much description. Well, I dumped all that out; I just threw it away.
It was a revolt, a literary revolt. That was my object. I wanted to develop a style of
writing based on the way American people spoke - not literary English. Of course,
the fact that the Chicago slang was all around me made it easy to pick up. (…)
Ultimately what made Little Caesar the enormous success it was, the smack in the
face it was, was the fact that it was the world seen completely through the eyes of a
gangster. It's a commonplace now, but it had never been done before then. You had
crime stories but always seen through the eyes of society. The criminal was just
some son-of-a-bitch who'd killed somebody and then you go get 'em. I treated 'em
as human beings. Well, what else are they? (in Hamilton 1990:49)
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