WRITERS BORN TODAY - W. R. BURNETT

It's the birthday of W. R. Burnett, born on this day in 1899. His crime novels set the standard for noir fiction and film in the 1930s and 40s. High Sierra, Little Caesar, and The Asphalt Jungle defined crime in Hollywood film and on the written page.

As a young man, Burnett got his start in politics, working on political campaigns for the Governor of Ohio. He soon discovered that the line between crime and public service was a thin one. "I knew from my earliest memory of how politics and crime were interwoven.", he said. He read everything he could get his hands on, good or bad. The novels he thought most important as a writer included Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara. Not bad for someone typecast as a crime writer.

With Burnett, plot played second fiddle to his character's fate. “I don’t have any plot in my books. Just life. And the relationship of characters and what happens to them”. In the end, most of his characters succumb to their own flaws.

Perhaps no work expressed this philosophy more than the novel The Asphalt Jungle. Made into a classic film, it portrays the heist of a jewelry store by a group of skilled professionals. Despite their initial success, the robbers are picked off one by one through a combination of their weakness, greed, and plain bad luck.

In 1980, he was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America, their highest honor.