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    Among the bright lights and the bar girls he traded honor for a harlot's kiss…     MURDER ROUND THE CLOCK!     Volari's was a place shunned by the law, stalked by the lawless and patronized by bored, idle people looking for kicks.     The big safe in the back room was ripe to be cracked-$200,000 ripe. Whispered word of heist came and spread-and with it came terror.     First a bar girl disappeared. Next a waiter. Then two of Volari's strong-arms were sent to find out why. They never came back…

    This is the story of a big-city political boss, a murder, a double man-hunt, and a fall guy-the perennial underdog who tries too hard to avoid trouble…     Jerry Clinch is the pigeon, who never had a break until Big Dan, boss of the 17th Ward Political Club, helped spring him from prison and hired him as his chauffeur. Big Dan has hidden enemies-and a beautiful wife, Rhea: and one day Clinch is on his own-the pigeon-with both the cops and the hoods of the town after him, while he is engaged in a desperate search for one man!     In the tough, realistic vein of Little Caesar, Vanity Raw, and The Asphalt Jungle, W. R. Burnett has written another tense yarn of underworld intrigue and suspense-shift, unsentimental, exciting to the last page.      ***          "W. R. Burnett… his sure, tough touch… W. R. Burnett's characters-tough and mean but with a strong urge of loyalty to their twisted code-always ring true. UNDERDOG is a solid and exciting book!"     -San Francisco Call Bulletin

The Asphalt Jungle (RosettaBooks Into Film)W.R. Burnett's brutally wise novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949) tells how the perfect crime can go easily awry when human nature is a factor, as it always is. Told in short, richly atmospheric chapters, the novel details the planning and execution of a major jewel heist. The robbery is devised by Doc Reimenschneider, a master criminal who has just been released from prison and will require the involvement of a number of people--including the muscle and itinerant hood named Dix, an overgrown country boy, andthe fence, a successful but sleazy lawyer named Alonzo Emmerich. The cast of characters will ultimately be the scheme's very downfall in an atmosphere rife with suspicion and double-crossing. The spelling out of the planning in The Asphalt Jungle is fascinating, but what truly grips the audience is the people who are involved and why they come to this point and what the chemistry of the situation does to them. The point of view shifts throughout the novel, providing surprising and deep insights into the characters and our culture at large. The Asphalt Jungle finds an "honest man" in Dix, the petty crook, who in his own way is as decent as the so-called "good guys," the commissioner and the reporter. A man who always seems out of his element, Dix longs to leave the rat race and return to the country setting of his childhood. With that in mind, Dix undertakes involvement in the heist, believing this is the way to make his dream a reality. He comes close--painfully, wistfully close, with punishing irony. ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Riley Burnett (1899-1981) was a master of fiction, a skillful writer, contemporary to James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. Burnett authored some 36 novels and either wrote alone or in collaboration 60 screenplays. His novels Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle represent a rich vein of thought in contemporary American literature and culture. After he began his career as a writer, Burnett moved to Chicago in the late 1920s at the height of Al Capone's power and sway over the city. It was this atmosphere, Chicago in the '20s and notably the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (Burnett was one of the first people on the scene) that inspired Burnett's first great success Little Caesar, which was made into a film by the same name starring Edward G. Robinson. After this initial success, Burnett had a strong, close working relationship with Hollywood as both a novelist and screenwriter, and eventually found a champion in writer/director John Huston. Burnett collaborated with Huston on the adaptation of High Sierra in 1941 in which Humphrey Bogart redefined himself in the role of Roy Earle. The two men's paths crossed again when Huston filmed The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. The Mystery Writers of America awarded Burnett their highest honor--the prestigious title of Grand Master--at the 1980 Edgar Awards. SERIES DESCRIPTIONS From classic book to classic film, RosettaBooks has gathered some of most memorable books into film available. The selection is broad ranging and far reaching, with books from classic genre to cult classic to science fiction and horror and a blend of the two creating whole new genres like Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man. Classic works from Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, meet with E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Whether the work is centered in the here and now, in the past, or in some distant and almost unimaginable future, each work is lasting and memorable and award-winning.

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Good Men Won't Go Into Politics! That is an American axiom.But Read Cole was a good man and a good governor of Ohio. He was concerned about the interests of his people and the State; he did what he thought was right and did it as well as he could. But no matter how capable and sincere, Read Cole was a practical politician. Politics was his career, he knew that a man went from Governor to Senator, from Senator to ...But that was in the future. At the moment Read Cole had a fight on his handsl he was running for reelection as Governor and he had to win. If he lost he was a has-been, a party wheelhorse fit only to warm the bench. America has no place for losing politicians.Here, then, is the story of a battle, with troops deploying, guns booming, and spies behind the lines - the story of Read Cole's battle to stay in office. Here is the story of what a good man will do, has to do, to win the votes we all cast so carelessly, sometimes so scornfully.Into the story and into the battle come Read Cole's son and daughter, irresponsible and giddy with youth; the neurotic wealthy woman he expects to marry; a madman with a postoll a newspaperman, completely besotted and umfortably safe, a bit of dynamite in the person of a pretty check-girl; a rabble-rousing radical , and the industrialists he has terrified into putting the weight of their money behind Cole and conservatism.The battle is joined in the six days leading up to November 4th. THis November 4th - any November 4th.The battle is not pretty - not battle is - but it is exciting and illuminating. Fascism, Communism, Liberalism - all of these varying ideals shrivel before the one conclusive reality; VOTES. God, her once again, is on the side of the biggest batallions.When you have lived through these six crackling days and stop for breath you will know more about politicians than you do now and more about yourself.

A novel about " the dark byways of crime... taut and menacing..." San Francisco Chronicle. Cover depicts a man with his hand raised to hit a woman smoking a cigarette.  

W.R. Burnett's brutally wise novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949) tells how the perfect crime can go easily awry when human nature is a factor, as it always is. Told in short, richly atmospheric chapters, the novel details the planning and execution of a major jewel heist. The robbery is devised by Doc Reimenschneider, a master criminal who has just been released from prison and will require the involvement of a number of people—including the muscle and itinerant hood named Dix, an overgrown country boy, andthe fence, a successful but sleazy lawyer named Alonzo Emmerich. The cast of characters will ultimately be the scheme's very downfall in an atmosphere rife with suspicion and double-crossing.The spelling out of the planning in The Asphalt Jungle is fascinating, but what truly grips the audience is the people who are involved and why they come to this point and what the chemistry of the situation does to them. The point of view shifts throughout the novel,...