The perspective here is much broader, the emphasis less on individual works than on trends and cycles. Many of the most revered gangster classics – including the two versions of Scarface (1932 and 1983) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – are mentioned only in passing; more attention is given to obscure but typical B-movies such as those produced by the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, and to films that stretch the definition of the genre, such as the horror film Black Friday (1940), which stars Boris Karloff and combines gangster melodrama with the story of Jekyll and Hyde.

Wilson’s style is dry but not always exact: he is capable of getting names wrong and of writing ‘prolific’ when he means ‘proficient’. Perhaps his biggest limitation is his failure to acknowledge how gangster cinema has flourished around the world, from the United Kingdom to Hong Kong. This casts doubt on his assumption that the untrammelled desires of the gangster are synonymous with the American Dream. By and large, though, this is a book that knows its job and does it well.