Classic gangster stuff, I believe. This book came out in 1949, and was made into a widely distributed movie just a year later, i.e. 1950. Apparently, Marilyn Monroe played a small part in the movie.

Whatever, a crook, Erwin Riemenschneider, often known as "the doctor" is released from prison. The cops see him, but only briefly. They're sure he's up to no good, but can't follow him. "The little doctor" gathers some other crooks around him and pull off an amazing jewel heist. It's almost a perfect crime, but there's a slip up, a gun goes off accidentally, people bleed all over the place,...and so forth. We have all the classic stuff of noir crime novels: corrupt cops, bookies, shyster lawyers, fancy gals, brute thugs, etc.

I believe that I read W. R. Burnett's more famous novel, Little Caesar a few years ago. Personally, I found this book to be much better written and much more engaging.
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The Asphalt Jungle by W.R. Burnett is a classic crime novel, and a great heist story. Set in the gritty streets of a large Midwestern city, the powers-that-be take note when a known criminal mastermind is released from prison. They are right to be concerned as he immediately starts planning a big job and gathering his crew.

I struggled a little getting into this story, I think there was too much time taken up with introducing the various characters. Typical with most hard boiled stories most of these characters were unlikeable but I also found many of them rather uninteresting as well. The actual heist was fascinating but went by very quickly. The book followed the whole cycle of crime, from the planning stages to it’s execution and the final outcome. It was hard to root for either the criminals or the police as I didn’t find much to choose from either of them.

I am usually a huge fan of this type of book, but something felt lacking in this one as it fell a little flat.. The writing was strong and colourful but as the story wound down it felt like it was running out of gas. I think I would like to try some of this authors other works like High Sierra or Little Caesar. I suspect the film adaptation might be the better way to go with The Asphalt Jungle. ( )

Easily the least of Burnett's three most famous crime novels that were turned into seminal American movies (the other two being Little Caesar and High Sierra), The Asphalt Jungle is a multiple point of view caper novel with some existential overtones set in a nameless Midwestern city that just might be St. Louis or Cincinnati (it's definitely not Cleveland or Chicago). A newly released German criminal mastermind with a predilection for nympholepsy immediately seeks out underworld contacts to assemble a crew who can assist him in looting a fortress-like jewelry store to help out his old cellmate (still imprisoned) and himself to finance his retirement. An assortment of ne'er-do-wells, dead-enders and vainglorious greedheads coalesce around the unfailingly polite little German, and everyone proceeds to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Rififi it ain't, and Stanley Kubrick would get more mileage out of The Asphalt Jungle's basic set-up and plot trajectory with his 1956 film The Killing (also starring The Asphalt Jungle's Sterling Hayden, based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break, with dialogue by noir master Jim Thompson), but it's not a bad time-killer, if you like this sort of thing. Burnett's cornpone, salt of the earth background for the down-on-his-luck hardcase Dix wears thin long before the climax (it feels like a weak echo of a similar background for his Dillinger stand-in Roy Earle in High Sierra), and even at a little over two hundred pages one is painfully aware of how cliched all of the characters are; still, the endings are efficiently crafted, and if Burnett's "Mary Sue" character here -- an irascible, auto-didactic newspaperman named Farbstein, who book-ends the novel -- throws pearls before swine by sententiously quoting Paradise Lost, well, like the cub reporter Young Bryan, you just gotta laugh. ( )