The book provided source material for the Academy Award-winning original screenplay by David S. Ward for The Sting (1973),[5] but in Maurer's view, The Big Con was not properly credited.
While an English major at Ohio State, Maurer took a summer job on a North Atlantic trawler fishing off the coast of New England, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
[8] Not only did the experience result in his first published journal article, "Schoonerisms: Some Speech Peculiarities of the North-Atlantic Fishermen",[9] it enabled him to learn criminal argots "through meeting the rumrunners and smugglers who worked the coastlines of the Eastern United States.
"[10] He would subsequently devote much of his academic career to studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, moonshiners, and other marginalized subcultures.
Maurer was described by his former student Stuart Berg Flexner as "big, with large shoulders and strong arms and hands, a man who can help pull in a heavy fishing net in freezing weather or push a car out of a muddy backroad on the way to an illegal still.
"[4] Maurer usually felt safe talking with underworld characters; however, he admitted he chose to not seek employment at Tulane University after he was warned that organized crime figures in New Orleans would not welcome being studied by him.
[2] Maurer began his linguistic research before portable tape recorders came into use, and so "he initially relied on his prodigious memory and extensive notes in shorthand.
[6] Ward disputed the allegation of plagiarism, stating that The Big Con was just one of several historical references he used, but that the entire screenplay was original.
Published in 1940, it was reissued in 1999 with Luc Sante providing a glowing Introduction that also appeared, in slightly modified form, in The New York Review of Books and Salon.
Sante wrote:The Big Con may be the only one of Maurer's books that can be read for purely literary value, but whether or not this is owed to a natural ability otherwise repressed in the interest of science, it flies along as if it had written itself.
Instead, the book tells stories with compelling characters, and it offers psychological insights, as illustrated in this excerpt about "the mark":A confidence man prospers only because of the fundamental dishonesty of his victim.
[17] The source material for The Big Con came from Maurer's correspondence, interviews, and informal chats with hundreds of underworld denizens during the 1930s.
The mark was told in confidence that there were certain disgruntled telegraph operators in the country who, given access to the right expensive equipment, knew how to "tap telegraph wires and obtain advance information on the results of a [horse] race, hold up these results until the race-fan had time to place a bet with a bookmaker, then advance the post-time and forward the results—with very happy consequences for the fan who had meanwhile bet on the winner.