Abstract
Chapter 6 focuses on Nelson DeMille’s novel The Gold Coast in the context of the mob story and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It traces the evolution of the mafia novel in the context of the history of crime and crime fiction in America. It argues that the novel demands to be read as a modern Satyricon in its distillate of late twentieth-century American mores and manners
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Notes
- 1.
Trevelyan (2006).
- 2.
Condon’s screenplay adaptation of his own bestseller won the Writers Guild of America award and nominations for the Best Writing Oscar and the Golden Globe.
- 3.
Twain, 176.
- 4.
Brantley (2010).
- 5.
In Finn, LI1.
- 6.
Walker (2000).
- 7.
BookBrowse (2000).
- 8.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-446-51504-7, and back cover, 2008 edition, respectively.
- 9.
Dyer, 49.
- 10.
Email 6 June 2015.
- 11.
July 2015.
- 12.
Corey and Brenner both star in The Panther (2012).
- 13.
146; all references are to The Gold Coast, unless indicated otherwise.
- 14.
Westlake, 12.
- 15.
Maloney and Hoffman.
- 16.
The Gold Coast, 726; The Gate House, 33.
- 17.
The Economist, “Dark Days”, 32.
- 18.
Biden (1993); on American political fictions, see Swirski (2015), Ars Americana, and (2011).
- 19.
The Economist, “Fixing”, 8.
- 20.
Until the 1930s, the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act ended up being used mainly against labor unions.
- 21.
On Lansky and Pendergast, see Swirski (2010), Chap. 2.
- 22.
MacInnes, BR2; see also Shepard, 52; for a cultural history of the mafia, see Dainotto.
- 23.
Personal interview, July 2015.
- 24.
In Summers and Swan, 183.
- 25.
Another story “Absolution” (1924) comes from an early version of Gatsby called Trimalchio; see West.
- 26.
The Gate House, 83–84.
- 27.
The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text, 202.
- 28.
Chapter 6 in Gatsby; on Fitzgerald, see Turnbull; Bruccoli; Meyers.
- 29.
When Nick gets drunk at Myrtle’s party, the narrative breaks down with him; fragmentation is, of course, a typical modernistic device.
- 30.
The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text, 207.
- 31.
On page 179 Wolsheim boasts that he “made” Gatsby; Maxwell Perkins’s spelling of the gangster’s name was Wolfsheim; (The Great Gatsby: The Authorized Text, 200); in the novel it is Wolfshiem. Incidentally, Fitzgerald’s first publication was a crime detective story.
- 32.
For discrepancy between the novel and historical facts, see Logan.
- 33.
Turnbull, 150.
- 34.
Page 193; Fitzgerald’s word of choice, changed by Edmund Wilson in his influential reedition of Gatsby, was “orgastic”.
- 35.
Leovy.
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Swirski, P. (2016). Take Two: Nelson DeMille and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In: American Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30108-2_6
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