High Sierra/The Asphalt Jungle

With High Sierra (1940) and The Asphalt Jungle (1949), MWA Grand Master Burnett (1899–1982) staked his claim as a pioneer of the heist genre—specifically, the heist-gone-wrong. Roy Earle, the protagonist of High Sierra, is unexpectedly bailed out of prison to honcho a caper on the safe deposit boxes of a luxury lodge in Tropico Springs, Calif. Velma, an attractive young woman Roy meets on the road, causes complications. In The Asphalt Jungle, Erwin Riemenschneider comes out of prison with a plan to loot jewels from a vault in a Midwestern city. Erwin turns to Emmerich, a crooked lawyer, to fund the operation, but that Emmerich is actually broke leads to trouble. Poetic descriptions of desert and mountains and of the rainswept metropolis provide the respective backdrops as Burnett meticulously details the planning, assembly of the crew, botched robbery, and aftermath for each novel. Scholar Cullen Gallagher supplies a new introduction. Noir fans will welcome the reissue of these two classics. (May)