Serpico. The Cop Who Defied the System.

MAAS, Peter [Al Pacino].

Item Number: 116392

New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

First edition of this classic work, basis for the film starring Al Pacino. Octavo, original cloth, with four pages of illustrations. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “Dedicated to all the cops of Ridgeville, Ohio (a corps of 2) Peter Maas.” Additionally signed by Al Pacino on the half-title page. Near fine in a good price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Stanley Phillips.

Peter Maas once said that his books usually started with "'some anger I have about something, or what someone does about something that gets them hurt'… Time and again he returned to organized crime, organized corruption and people whose revelations shattered myths or created new ones. He spent the 1980s and 90s investigating everyone from Mafia turncoats to rogue CIA agents to clemency-sellers in Tennessee after he became famous in the 1960s and 70s for a pair of true-crime stories. One was about Joseph Valachi, who revealed the secrets of the Mafia. The other was about NY detective Frank Serpico." Based on months of interviews and written with "effortless smoothness," his book chronicles Serpico's struggle to combat corruption and the shooting that nearly killed him (New York Times). The 1973 film adaptation starring Al Pacino and directed by Sidney Lumet won Oscar nominations for Pacino, and screenwriters Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler. Maas, who died in 2001, "gave half of his $400,000 screen rights income to Serpico. 'After all,' he observed, 'it’s his life'" (Los Angeles Times).