Scarface
1st Edition
Published on 5. September 2005
Book
192 pages
978-0-7475-7861-1 (ISBN)
Description
'I'm Scarface. I'm just about ten times as hard-boiled as Johnny Lovo ever thought of being. I've bumped off six or eight myself and another one - especially a rat like you - wouldn't mean a thing in my young life. Get me?' In the mean streets of Chicago, a young man is unwilling to follow his parents into a life of squalor and poverty and hungers to become a big shot. Tony Guarino has grown up in the hard world of the bar and the poolroom, where every gangster is a hero and every cop an enemy. Only the tough make it. At the age of just eighteen, Tony commits his first serious crime. He shoots dead the gang boss and ruthless slayer Al Spingola. In an era when gunplay is still rare, Tony's actions unnerve the other gang leaders, and Tony is catapulted into notoriety and fame. This is just the beginning of his path to becoming the most powerful and feared man in the Chicago underworld.
Reviews / Votes
'Ambition, greed and murder, all amid a whirlwind of cocaine' The TimesMore details
Person
Armitage Trail was the pseudonym for the American author Maurice Coons, the son of a theatrical impresario who managed the road tours of the New Orleans Opera Company. He left school at sixteen and started selling stories to magazines. Maurice Coons gathered the elements for Scarface when living in Chicago, where he became acquainted with many local Sicilian gangs. For a couple of years, Coons spent his nights prowling Chicago's gangland with his friend, a lawyer, and spent his days sitting in the sun room of his apartment writing Scarface. Armitage Trail's only other surviving novel is The Thirteenth Guest which, together with Scarface, prefigure the birth of hardboiled fiction. Maurice Coons died of a heart attack when he was twenty-eight.