W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle

The Asphalt Jungle is a 1949 novel by W.R. Burnett (1899-1982), one of the great hardboiled/noir American crime writers.

This is the story of a heist. It’s told mostly from the point of view of the criminals but we get the cops’ point of view as well, as Police Commissioner Hardy struggles to restore the pride of his corrupt police force. There’s a lot at stake for him. This is a very big high-profile heist. If the police fail to solve the case Hardy’s reputation will be in tatters and the City Administration will fall. If they do solve it Hardy will be a hero and the reputation of the police will be freed from the stench of corruption and incompetence.

But mostly it’s the story of the men carrying out the robbery. Riemenschneider, a mild-mannered German, is just out of prison. He might look like a harmless academic (and he is known as the Professor) but his profession is crime. Big-time crime. And he has in his possession a fool-proof plan devised by his cell-mate, Joe Cool. The plan is for a jewel theft on the grand scale, the robbery of the city’s most famous jewellers.

Riemenschneider needs someone to put up fifty grand to cover the expenses of the operation. The heist should net at least half a million dollars in jewels. Riemenschneider wants crooked lawyer Alonzo Emmerich to finance the heist. The plan sounds so tempting that Emmerich can’t say no. They’ll need a toolman. Louis Bellini is the obvious choice. Gus, who runs a hamburger joint, will be the driver. But they need a strong-arm man. Gus suggests Dix Handley. Dix seems a bizarre choice. He was big-time once but now he’s strictly small-time but they can’t find anyone else so Dix gets the job.

What the reader knows but the heisters don’t know is that a double-cross has been planned right from the start. The reader will also have formed the impression that this is a heist doomed to failure. These guys think they’re big-time but they’re losers. They’re just not smart enough. The only one with any brains is Riemenschneider.

We figure something will go wrong but we don’t know exactly what it will be.

The cops in this story are not very smart. They don’t need to be. They have the entire apparatus of the criminal justice system behind them. And they’re well aware that they have other advantages. In any heist there’s at least one weak link, one guy who will shoot off his mouth or betray his fellow heisters. The cops also know that while they can afford to make a few mistakes the criminals cannot afford any. The criminals also cannot afford a single piece of bad luck, and no heist has ever gone off without at least one piece of bad luck. The cops know from the start they’re going to win in the end. The heisters just don’t realise that the odds are so heavily against them. That’s why they all have prison records. They have never learnt that something always go wrong, and then you wind up in the penitentiary.

There’s a tragic inevitability to this tale.

Dix is the character who stands out for us. He’s a lot like Roy Earle in Burnett's High Sierra. He’s a career criminal who doesn’t really understand how his life turned out the way it did. Like Roy he has some redeeming qualities. Dix has a woman, a cheap prostitute named Doll. He keeps thinking he should ditch her. But that would necessitate being cruel to her, and cruelty just isn’t in Dix’s nature. He just can’t bring himself to hurt Doll. Like Roy Earle, Dix is obsessed with daydreams of his boyhood. He lived on a farm. It was an idyllic life. He is slowly coming to realise that he should never have left the farm. Now he can think of only one thing - going home again. It’s a fantasy, but more and more he lives in that fantasy.

Dix is not evil. He has done many bad things but he has never quite lost a certain core of decency. That decency is now tattered and torn but it’s still there.

The other heisters aren’t really evil either. They are men with at least one weakness. For Louis it’s his family. He’s a devoted husband and father. Crime seems to be the only way he can provide for them. Gus is a really nice guy and he’s gone straight since his last stretch inside but he gets drawn into the gang anyway. Riemenschneider is basically a gentle man but he likes money. He also likes young women, and money attracts young women. Emmerich has been so successful for so long that he’s become over-confident and he’s allowed his financial affairs to slide into chaos. And he has a very expensive young mistress.

There’s enough of a sense of doom and corruption to qualify this book as noir fiction. Dix has enough moral ambiguity to qualify as a typical noir protagonist. There is however no femme fatale. Doll is simply hopelessly devoted to Dix. Emmerich’s mistress Angela is on the make but she’s quite transparent about it, and she’s too sweet and good-natured to be a femme fatale.

The Asphalt Jungle is a fine suspenseful story but it’s the psychological complexity and the sense of yearning for a largely imaginary past that makes it a great crime novel. Highly recommended.

Stark House have re-issued The Asphalt Jungle in a two-novel paperback edition paired with another great Burnett crime novel, High Sierra.