THE SPECTACULAR ORIGINAL NOVEL BEHIND THE CLASSIC AL PACINO FILM

'Ambition, greed and murder, all amid a whirlwind of cocaine' The Times

'I'm Scarface. I'm just about ten times as hard-boiled as Johnny Lovo ever thought of being. I've bumped off six or eight myself and another one - especially a rat like you - wouldn't mean a thing in my young life. Get me?'

In the mean streets of Chicago, a young man is unwilling to follow his parents into a life of squalor and poverty and hungers to become a big shot.

Tony Guarino has grown up in the hard world of the bar and the poolroom, where every gangster is a hero and every cop an enemy. Only the tough make it. At the age of just eighteen, Tony commits his first serious crime. He shoots dead the gang boss and ruthless slayer Al Spingola. In an era when gunplay is still rare, Tony's actions unnerve the other gang leaders, and Tony is catapulted into notoriety and fame.

This is just the beginning of his path to becoming the most powerful and feared man in the Chicago underworld.
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Author Armitage Trail - real name Maurice Coons - published only two novels before his tragic death by heart attack at age twenty-eight. Scarface prefigured the rise of hardboiled fiction in the hands of authors like Raymond Chandler and Dash Hammett, and would have been the start of a legendary literary career had the author lived. Instead, it stands as a solitary classic, steeped in the then-contemporary crime and violence of Al Capone's Chicago.