(1903-1931)
Armitage Trail, his brother Hannibal would recall, “was interested in gangsters as other men are in terested in postage stamps, old coins, or spread-eagled butterflies.” His real name was Maurice Coons, the son of a successful and intriguingly diverse man who both managed the New Orleans Opera Company and manufactured furniture. Maurice dropped out of school at 16 to give all his time to writing, and he was selling stories by the time he was 17. In the mid-1920s, he moved with his family to Illinois, where his father opened a garden furniture factory, and then to Chicago when Mr. Coons took an executive job at a home-building company.
Chicago in the ’20s, of course, was the place to go if you were interested in gangsters. Maurice Coons began exploring the town’s gang-ruled streets and lowlife centers. He met an Italian-American lawyer who was instrumental in getting Coons accepted by “the boys” in the various back rooms and speakeasies around town. “For the next year or more,” said Hannibal Coons, “my brother spent most of his nights prowling Chicago’s gangland . . . . He spent evenings beyond number with gangsters and their families. He met their mothers. . . . He prowled Chicago’s gangland until he knew enough about gangsters, and about Capone, the top gangster of them all, to write Scarface.”
W. R. burnett’s Little Caesar, published in 1929, beat Armitage Trail to the punch as the first big topic based on the Al Capone legend, but Trail kept going, certain he could top Burnett or anybody with his inside angle and the real facts about Big Al. Every morning, still awake from a long night out with the gangsters, he would sit in the sunroom of his family’s Oak Park apartment and write his novel. Scarface, published in 1930 (and dedicated to the pulp editor Leo Margulies), was a fast, brutal document, the bullet-riddled biography of Tony “Scarface” Guarino, a fictionalized but not particularly romanticized version of the Al Capone story (though Trail gives his Scarface the brutal death—by his own policeman brother—that the Chicago cops or rival gangsters were never able to accomplish with the real mob boss). Armitage Trail had few of Burnett’s gifts as a novelist, but Trail’s topic vividly evoked a ruthless nihilistic underworld where law and order and anything like normal behavior does not exist.
Trail sold Scarface for $25,000 to a young producer named Howard Hughes and went west to help transfer his novel to the screen. According to W. R. Burnett, who was soon working for Hughes on a Scarface screenplay, “Trail never drew another sober breath.” He quickly affected a flamboyant Hollywood lifestyle, hiring a chauffeur, wearing an assortment of wide-brimmed Borsalino hats, and living well, a big man getting bigger (he weighed more than 300 pounds, according to his brother). Scarface (1932), scripted by Burnett, Ben Hecht, John Mahin, and others, and directed by Howard Hawks, became a film masterpiece. But Armitage Trail did not live to see it—he dropped dead of a heart attack inside Hollywood’s Grau-man’s Chinese Theatre.
Works
- Scarface (1930)
- Trocchi, Alexander See lengel, frances.
