(1892-1977)
Dashiell hammett, Raymond chandler, and James M. cain are the father, son, and holy ghost of American hard-boiled literature. Appearing on the cultural scene—that is, as respectable hardcover authors—at well-spaced intervals between 1929 and 1939, each brought his own separate but equally powerful and influential style to the new form of realistic/poetic crime fiction. This trio could be said to have been the progenitor for every hard-boiled crime story and movie that followed.
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, Cain had originally dreamed of a very different artistic pursuit. Young Jimmy wanted to be an opera singer (his educator father had dabbled in opera before him). Although Cain lacked the natural vocal equipment for the job and gave it up, opera would remain a great love, and as a novelist he would work the subject into several of his stories, with some bizarre results.
He began to think about a writing career while in college and in the spring of 1917, after a brief stint as a teacher, he took a job as a reporter at the Baltimore American. Interrupted only by his time as a soldier in World War I (he saw action in the battle of the Meuse-Argonne in France) he would work as a journalist for the next 14 years. He moved on to the Baltimore Sun, building a reputation as a reporter and writer. The town’s literary celebrity, H. L. Mencken, befriended him and served as something of a mentor. Cain would go on to editorial positions in New York and became an important figure in the journalistic circles of the day, a protege of the legendary newsman Walter Lippmann and briefly the managing editor of a start-up magazine called The New Yorker. Unlike Hammett and Chandler, ne’er-do-wells who stumbled into writing through the back door of the pulp magazines, Cain was a great success long before his first topic was published. But he was unsatisfied with his journalistic work, and his attempts to write plays and novels in New York had all come to nothing. He needed a fresh start, he thought, and with the help of an agent he managed to secure a screenwriting contract with Paramount Pictures in Hollywood.
The movies did not turn out to be Cain’s true calling but the new scenery and a group of new screenwriter buddies including Samson Raphael-son and Vincent Lawrence encouraged Cain in his creation of a novel. He had an idea about a guy and a dame, a couple of nobodies running a gas station, who kill a man. Someone got him thinking about the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray case, a tabloid sensation: a corset salesman and a married woman killed the woman’s husband and eventually turned on each other. Cain told a writer friend, “That jells the idea I’ve had for just such a story; a couple of jerks who discover that a murder, though dreadful enough morally, can be a love story too, but then wake up to discover that once they’ve pulled the thing off, no two people can share this terrible secret and live on the same earth. They turn on each other, as Judd and Ruth did.”
Cain started writing. It took a while and some coaching and advice from Lippmann, Lawrence, and others, but in the end Cain had something good. He was calling it Bar-B-Que. The developer, Alfred A. Knopf, didn’t like it.He related a time when he was waiting day after day for an important letter to come in the mail. Lawrence knew when it was the postman at the door: “The son of a bitch always rang twice,” he said. Cain thought, wasn’t that an old English tradition or something, the postman ringing or knocking twice before going away? It evoked something about the topic, the delayed punishment bestowed on his murdering characters. Cain had a title: The Postman Always Rings Twice.
And he had a story. A bum wanders into the lives of an ugly Greek man and his sexy wife, the proprietors of a roadside gas station and cafe. The bum and the wife are drawn into a sexual affair. They decide to kill the husband. They screw up the first attempt and make good on the second. The relationship between the killer couple goes sour, then reignites, but an ironic justice catches up with them both.
The topic was a sensation, and Cain became famous. From the much quoted first sentence— “They threw me off the hay truck about noon”— the novel gripped the reader with a blunt, sordid, compulsive readability. The copywriters did not exaggerate this time: the topic was “like a ride on a rollercoaster . . .” with “the speed and violence and energy of dynamite.” The first-person narration, the voice of a not-too-smart drifter, an everyman-as-loser, and a simple yet supercharged telling of events, ripped through the polite, distancing layers of literature. The topic read with the clarity and immediacy of a tabloid front-page story but was shot through with an ineffable lingering romanticism and poetry. Cain had taken some of the realistic effects and hard-boiled style developed in the pulps—and in the tabloids, and in the work of Ernest Hemingway and Ring Lardner—and added a crucial new ingredient, passion. Postman was above all a love story, drifter Frank Chambers and the hellcat Cora a gutter Tristan and Iseult. This was a tragic love story like nothing else in American literature nothing, anyway, that had been sold above the counter:
She started for the lunchroom again, but I stopped her. “Let’s—leave it locked.”
“Nobody can get in if it’s locked. I got some cooking to do. I’ll wash up this plate.”
I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers . . .
“Bite me! Bite me!”
I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.
With a good, tricky, twisting story to tell, Cain had stripped it of excess, stripped it to the sharp, glistening bones. Postman was only 35,000 words long, not much more than a novelette (Knopf had used huge type and large margins to stretch it to 188 pages in hardcover). Cain even eliminated the dead weight of “he said” and “she said,” letting the reader instinctively figure out who was speaking. For years this would be the exemplar of a page-turner. The topic became part of the literary and popular culture, the standard by which topics about lust and love and murder would be judged for decades to come.
After waiting so long for a first good idea to coalesce into a finished novel, Cain was slow to get a second project off the ground. He wrote columns and short stories and did some work for the movies before he finally succumbed to the big-money offers from magazines to write a serial. It was meant to be a quickie job that Cain vowed would never be reprinted as a topic. While researching Postman, Cain had talked to some insurance investigators, and with another real-life crime for inspiration he wrote a story about a woman conspiring with an insurance salesman to kill her husband and collect on his policy. “It would,” he wrote his agent, “be more of a love story than a murder story, but as jealousy is the main theme that wrecks them it would move all right on an exciting end.” Cain realized that this story, Double Indemnity, was essentially another version of Postman, not as well-written, but it was also a compulsively readable work, filled with exceptional dialogue, Southern California exotica, and a richly detailed inside tour of the insurance business. It was published as a serial in Liberty magazine, and then it found its way to hardcover publication as part of a volume of short works (with Career in C Minor and The Embezzler) published under the title Three of a Kind.
Cain’s next major work, Serenade, “about an opera singer and a Mexican whore,” as he described it, offered material at least as shocking as the sex-and-violence scenes in The Postman Always Rings Twice—including a bisexual hero and torrid lovemaking in a Mexican church. Cain built the story out of a weird mixture of ideas and experiences, including his theories about the “sex coefficient” of an opera singer (that is, whether he was hetero- or homosexual) and how it affected his voice; his friendship with a closeted Charles Laughton, and a meeting with a prostitute in a Guatemala City whorehouse. The story combined these elements with a murder plot with another ironic plot twist of a crime catching up with you in the end.
The novel was published in 1937 to general acclaim, but also to no small degree of controversy. Many pundits and librarians, along with the Catholic Church, were angered and repulsed by its sordid contents: homicides, whores, perversions, sex in church, and the use of sacramental wine in an iguana stew. In retrospect, many critics consider the topic the most problematic of Cain’s major works. The author’s notions of homosexuality—al-though he would claim they were based on clinical evidence gleaned from medical authorities—would come to seem dated at the least, at worst lending what was intended as the topic daring, cutting-edge material a feeling of absurd cluelessness. Cain’s hard-boiled first-person narrative style, perfect for Postman’s drifter, strained credibility in the person of an erudite opera star, and the terse, highspeed prose that had worked so well for a taut, straight-ahead story felt out of place in Serenade’s amble through varying landscapes and spans of time. At its release, the topic sold well, but not nearly as well as Postman. Cain and others believed it was because word of mouth about the homosexual element in the last half lost many readers un comfortable with anything to do with that subject, especially the disturbing notion that a story’s “hero,” making love to a voluptuous Mexican whore on one page, could turn out to be a “fairy” on another. It is always difficult to defend material others find offensive or frightening, but many of Cain’s contemporary fans feel Serenade, for all its awkwardness, is a remarkable work.
Cain’s third major work was a mingling of old and new. Like Double Indemnity, it was set in the Southern California milieu against a closely observed background of a particular work environment and suburban lifestyle. It moved away, however, from the easily digested murder plots and the terse first-person hard-boiled narration of his past works. Mildred Pierce was the story of a modern woman, a “commonplace suburban housewife with a nice figure and a way with men.” Cain charted Pierce’s travails with a weak husband, a series of shifty boyfriends, and an ungrateful daughter as she simultaneously finds success as a pie-baking entrepreneur. The topic was more like the conventional best-sellers and slick magazine fiction serials of the day than the ruthless, breathless stuff that had made Cain’s reputation, but it was strong and incisive nonetheless.
Cain would continue to write good topics, including his historical novel, Past All Dishonor, a particularly underrated work, and continue to cause controversy with The Butterfly, an “Appalachian Postman” with the startling addition of incest. But Cain’s place as a writer of importance in the American scene began to slip after the publication of Mildred Pierce and never quite recovered. Ironically, though, he would become a crucial name in motion pictures beginning at just this same period. Billy Wilder’s stunning film version of Double Indemnity (with a script by Wilder and Raymond Chandler) would spark a trend for tough murder/love stories, and would finally bring to the big screen versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce (retooled as a film noir), and even in due time and minus the censorable content, Serenade.
The combination of his early titles and the film successes made Cain for many years the most famous of all the hard-boiled novelists. While the other members of the hard-boiled trinity, Hammett and Chandler, were often dismissed as mere mystery writers, no matter how innovative, Cain’s work seemed better able to fit a traditional definition of literature. He was once referred to as the “American Zola” for his brutally realistic depictions of the “human beast.” Cultural poobahs like Edmund Wilson, who dismissed most of the tough crime writers of the day as trivialists and mere entertainers, found Cain to be a serious artist. Cain himself resented anyone who lumped him with Hammett and Chandler as the leaders of a “hard-boiled school” of fiction. He claimed never to have read either writer.
Eventually—and arguably—Cain’s reputation would be eclipsed by the other two, whose relatively brief careers offered a compact and cohesive body of work. Cain, on the other hand, outlived the mainstream vogue for his work, but kept on writing, producing fiction that showed less and less of the original power. The later work diminished his standing, although those first remarkable topics continued to attract fans. Portions of later topic, like Rainbow’s End from 1975 with its brisk plot, violence, and implications of incest, showed that Cain still had the old storytelling fire, an inimitable narrative gift, well into his seventies.
Works
- Butterfly, The (1947);
- Galatea (1953);
- Institute, The (1976);
- Jealous Woman (1948);
- Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942);
- Magician’s Wife, The (1965);
- Mignon (1962);
- Mildred Pierce (1941);
- Moth, The (1948);
- Past All Dishonor (1946);
- Postman Always Rings Twice, The (1934);
- Rainbow’s End (1975);
- Root of His Evil, The (1951);
- Serenade (1937);
- Sinful Woman (1947);
Three of a Kind: Career in C Major/The Embezzler/Double Indemnity (1943)
