Big-shot Gangsters and Small-time Crooks

Abstract

Roy Earle, a gangster on the run in W. R. Burnett’s High Sierra (1940), throws his newspaper down in disgust and launches into an indignant tirade against society’s injustices. He assails a system that defines and severely punishes John Dillinger as a criminal but does little to deter the corrupt policeman, the banker who loses the depositors’ money in the stock market, the judge who takes bribes tofix cases, the preacher who gyps his congregation, or the big-shot official who sells jobs. ‘Why do people stand it?’ Earle demands. ‘A few guys have got all the dough in this country. Millions of people ain’t got enough to eat. Not because there ain’t nofood, but because they got no money. Somebody else has got it all’ (150–1). Even when their criminal protagonists do not voice such forthright criticisms, the gangster-centred novels of the time are implicitly concerned with the issues raised by Roy Earle (himself a character whom Burnett based on Dillinger).’ Gangster novels repeatedly depict the cripplingly hierarchical nature of society, with its divisions between the haves and the have-nots, and draw attention to the similarity between apparently respectable businessmen and those whom society defines as criminals. The mythologised gangster can only be understood in relation to the wider society, whether he is cast as a villain whose actions confirm the need for law and order or as an outlaw hero admired for the toughness and energy with which he defies the system.