One Man's Opinion: LITTLE CAESAR by W R BURNETT

 

'Rico was a simple man. He loved but three things: homself, his hair and his gun. He took excellent care of all three.' 

Takes me back, this, to the days when Saturdays were black and white and to trips to the Scala cinema in Kings Cross where a double or triple bill of gangster movies ranked among my favourite passtimes.

All these years later, I've finally caught up and read the book. 

It's a terrific tale, always growing and moving forward, like Rico himself, written in a simple style that captures description and mood with plainspeak and aparent ease. 

Rico is rising through the ranks. From nothing, he soon takes over his gang based upon his cold menace, violent actions and clever calculations. Needless to say, he makes enemies along the way. He also ignores his orders during a heist and plugs a policeman mid-robbery. It's clear from then on that this is going to haunt him and, indeed, will eventually lead to his downfall. 

There's an interesting cast of characters surrounding our protagonist, most of them with a nickname that gives you everything you need. They're all pretty exaggerated. Characatures if you like. It's not that they're not three-dimensional, more that they're distilled downed to their essences - loyal-to-a-fault, bitter, yellow, hard, straight etc. 

When he gets to meet the big players, Rico realises that his eyes are bigger than his stomach. Perhaps its his drive to rise further that leads him to errors of judgement. Whatever it is, he's soon on the run and the cops are determined to get their man. His demise is tense and offers a great contrast to the opulence of his dreams and past status, as well as showing us where he came from in the first place. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this and it was everything I expected. Not that it was without its challenges. I found some of the dialogue tags (or sometimes the lack of them) difficult to follow and the runs of adjectives could have been cut from three or four to one or two. Even so, it's fast-paced, efficient and a wonderful discription of a disintigrating human mind. I'm sure if I knew my Shakespeare, I might venture to add Shakespearean to pack it into a nutshell. 

Punchy writing, brutal clarity and really enjoyable.

To finish, a Big Boy quote just for fun:

'I got a library too and a lot of other stuff that ain't worth a damn. I was talking to a rich guy the other day and he said I was a damn fool to buy real books because he had a library twice as big as mine and dummy books. What the hell! If a guy's gonna have a library, why, I say do it right. So there you are. I got so damn many books it gives me a headache just to look at 'em.'