The Asphalt Jungle

W.R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle unfolds in short, vivid bursts of atmosphere and character — a tough and seemingly artless kind of American fiction that reaches out from another era. Yet the novel still slices to the bone in its depiction of the duplicity and corruption that undoes a group of ambitious crooks. Burnett (1899-1981) was a prolific novelist and screenwriter whose terse, concentrated style and stark understanding of human nature made him one of the definitive masters of modern crime fiction.