Caesar Rico is a small-time gangster in Prohibition-era Chicago, one of crime boss Sam Vettori’s lieutenants. He’s ordered to take a crew to rob a club during a New Year’s Eve party—but the holdup takes a turn for the worse when Rico shoots and kills a popular police captain.

Using this distinctly unwanted outcome as leverage, Rico starts to climb to the top of Vettori’s criminal empire—but he quickly discovers that the summit can be very slippery.

Little Caesar is often called the first gangster novel, and it certainly delivers in its realistic depiction of crime, the people in the social strata who are concerned with it, and their unique period patois. The novel was a hugely popular bestseller precisely because it was one of the first to record what life was like in the criminal gangs that had a stranglehold on American urban life.

The novel was later adapted into the 1931 film of the same name, famous for, like its literary counterpart, being the first “gangster film” that established many of the gangster-movie tropes we take for granted today.