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