Little Caesar

Cesare Bandello, known to everyone as Rico, is a small-time Chicago hoodlum with one ambition: to reach the top of the underworld and stay there. Burnett tracks his climb from cheap holdups to the leadership of a powerful gang, then his swift, brutal fall once the men he stepped on begin to close in. First published in 1929, the novel more or less invented the modern gangster story, trading romantic outlaws for cold, ambitious criminals who talk and think like real ones. It became the basis for the famous 1931 film with Edward G. Robinson. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings back a lean, tough book that still reads like the blueprint for everything the crime genre did afterward.