Reeling Bullets is a particularly useful study of the work on film by the iconic hardboiled writer WR Burnett, delivered with both enthusiasm and scholarship by Andy Rohmer. Burnett was particularly prolific as a screenwriter in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, and his literary production didn’t lag far behind, with over 50 novels to his credit (in crime and other genres). He was one of the progenitors of the gangster genre, and the Edward G Robinson/Mervyn LeRoy film of his novel Little Caesar (1930) made a considerable impact, inaugurating the famous Warner Brothers cycle of mobster movies. Burnett went on to script both Scarface (1932) and High Sierra (1941). The Asphalt Jungle was one of the first novels to describe a heist – in commanding detail – and remains (with High Sierra) one of the author’s best-regarded books. His protagonist, Reimenschneider, is fresh out of prison and keen to get back to the activities that put him there in the first place. Planning a new heist, his financial backer is the corrupt lawyer Emmerich, whose complicated private life has forced him to hire a bent private eye. Other members of the ill-assorted team include the brutal Dix and his girlfriend, the latter yearning for an Arcadian escape from her dispiriting life. The conflicts within the gang are described with a mordant voice that places the reader firmly in the centre of these preparations and the subsequent robbery. When things (inevitably) go wrong, the self-detonation of the group is as fascinating as anything in crime fiction. Rohmer’s exhaustive study is invaluable for anyone interested in the subject. There is a caveat: closer attention might have been paid to copyediting (i.e. the score for John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven was famously written by Elmer Bernstein and not Henry Mancini), but this is still a book for every crime film enthusiast’s shelf.
Reeling Bullets: WR Burnett on Film by Andy Rohmer is published by Writers on Film
