He left his civil service job in Springfield to move to Chicago when he was 28, by which time he had written over 100 short stories and five novels, all unpublished.

Thematically[citation needed] Burnett was similar to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but contrasting the corruption and corrosion of the city with the better life his characters yearned for.

In High Sierra (1941), Humphrey Bogart plays Roy Earle, a hard-bitten criminal who rejects his life of crime to help a sexually appealing crippled girl.

In The Beast of the City (1932) starring Walter Huston, the police take the law into their own hands when the criminals walk free due to legal incompetence.

Heywood Broun described Burnett's novel Goodbye to the Past as "written with all the excitement of Little Caesar, and ten times the skill".