Organized Crime on Page and Screen

Thanks to writers like Mario Puzo, filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and actors like Al Pacino and James Gandolfini, American and Sicilian Mafia characters are well-known figures in contemporary popular culture. Other powerful organized crime groups appearing in popular media include the Neapolitan Camorra and Mexican drug cartels.
This book takes a close look at all these examples of organized crime by examining the different ways these organizations and their members have been portrayed in many of our most popular novels, movies, and TV series, and how the gangster figure has evolved from its earliest depictions in a trio of Hollywood films in the 1930s up to the present day.

David Geherin, a professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of ten books on crime fiction, three of which were finalists for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award. He lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

David Geherin
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 233
Bibliographic Info: bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2024
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9317-0
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5474-4
Imprint: McFarland

Preface 1
Introduction 3

Part I—Crime Fiction
Italian Mafias and Neapolitan Camorra 11
Leonardo Sciascia 11
Andrea Camilleri 16
Massimo Carlotto 22
Roberto Saviano 28
The American Mafia 39
Mario Puzo 39
Richard Condon 50
Laurence Shames 58
Tod Goldberg 65
Mexican Drug Cartels 77
James Carlos Blake 77
Don Winslow 86

Part II—Movies and TV
Movies 111
Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface 111
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Trilogy 114
Five Movies by Martin Scorsese 129
Matteo Garrone: Gomorrah (2009) 147
Comic Gangster Movies 152
TV Series 163
The Sopranos (1999–2007) 163
Breaking Bad (2008–2013) 174
Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014) 188
Peaky Blinders (2013–2022) 199
Gomorrah: The Series (2014–2021) 207

Bibliography 211
Index 217

Finalist, Edgar Allan Poe Award—Mystery Writers of America