Armitage Trail was the pseudonym for the American author Maurice Coons, the son of a theatrical impresario who managed the road tours of the New Orleans Opera Company. He left school at sixteen and started selling stories to magazines. Maurice Coons gathered the elements for Scarface when living in Chicago, where he became acquainted with many local Sicilian gangs. For a couple of years, Coons spent his nights prowling Chicago's gangland with his friend, a lawyer, and spent his days sitting in the sun room of his apartment writing Scarface. Armitage Trail's only other surviving novel is The Thirteenth Guest which, together with Scarface, prefigure the birth of hardboiled fiction. Maurice Coons died of a heart attack when he was twenty-eight.