The conversation between the cop and the criminal, as recounted by Adamson himself in The Making of Heat, could have come straight from a Hollywood thriller:

Adamson: Why don’t you go somewhere else and cause trouble? McCauley: I like Chicago. Adamson: You realize that one day you’re going to be taking down a score, and I’m going to be there. McCauley: Well, look at the other side of the coin. I might have to eliminate you. Adamson: I’m sure we’ll meet again.

One year later, McCauley and his gang followed a security gang to a supermarket, before storming the building and seizing a large sum of cash. Unbeknown to them, Adamson had been on their trail for weeks, and was now sitting outside the building, waiting for McCauley and his gang to leave. They well knew that any attempt to apprehend them inside would result in a bloodbath (“There were too many people… God, it would have been awful,” Adamson would later recall.)

As the crooks attempted to flee the scene in a getaway car, Adamson and his partner opened fire. An on-foot chase ensued, with McCauley ultimately brought down on a local resident’s front lawn by one of Adamson’s bullets. It was an abrupt end for one of Chicago’s most prolific career criminals, and McCauley’s story would eventually be retold – albeit in fictionalised form – almost exactly 30 years later in Michael Mann’s crime thriller, Heat, that stark exchange above forming the basis of its similarly intense meeting between Pacino and De Niro.

By the 1980s, Chuck Adamson had managed to make the transition from detective to writer, bringing decades of his experiences on the streets of Chicago to shows such as Miami Vice and Crime Story. Adamson had befriended Mann years earlier, and the filmmaker was immediately taken by the former detective’s story about McCauley, in particular the notion of two men on opposing sides of the law with a single-minded attitude to their jobs.

It’s a theme Mann explored in his 1986 feature, Manhunter, which took Thomas Harris’ best-selling novel and turned it into an eerily clinical, unsettling procedural thriller where its sociopathic killer was given almost as much prominence as the cop trying to catch him. The movie was a cult rather than financial hit, but it, along with Mann’s 1981 film Thief, set the tone for the detailed crime thriller to come.