(1902-1966) Also wrote as: Peter Ruric
Paul Cain, otherwise known as Peter Ruric, whose real name was George Sims, from Des Moines, Iowa, produced a small but superb body of work in the early 1930s. A favorite of Black Mask editor Joseph Shaw—Dashiell hammett’s great acolyte in the pulps—Cain took Hammett’s sharp, smart, hard-boiled style and ran with it in a novel and a series of short stories about the urban American underworld. These gemlike stories were stoic and merciless vignettes that seemed to come direct from the bootlegging front lines. The novel, Fast One, recounted the explosive, liquor-soaked adventure of Gerry Kells, a gambler from back east, a World War I vet addicted to morphine, who becomes the catalyst for a gang war in Prohibition-era Los Angeles. Published as a series of stand-alone segments in five issues of Black Mask magazine, Fast One was a cold-hearted, machine-gun-paced masterwork.
Knocking around in Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s, enjoying a hard-drinking, brawling lifestyle, the writer—as Ruric—earned the odd film credit, including one for the script of the fantastic, Edgar ulmer-directed The Black Cat, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. With his shifting identities and erratic output, Cain seemed to take a laughing, unambitious attitude towards personal fame and success. To an anthologist seeking biographical information about the author of the Cain stories, he sent a comical curriculum vitae in which he claimed to be a former Dada painter, bosun’s mate, and gynecologist. After the ’40s he drifted to Europe, living a seedy expatriate’s life on the Spanish island of Majorca. His works unpublished for many years, he died in obscurity, but latter-day attention for his story collection, Seven Slayers, and one novel, Fast One, have secured Cain a place in the hard-boiled fiction pantheon.
Works
STORIES
- “Black” (May 1932);
- “Chinaman’s Chance” (Sept.
- 1935); “Death Song” (Jan. 1936);
- “Dutch Treat” (Dec.
- 1936); “Hunch” (Mar. 1934);
- “Murder Done in Blue” (June 1933);
- “One, Two, Three” (May 1933);
- “Parlor Trick” (July 1933);
- “Pigeon Blood” (Nov. 1933);
- “Pineapple” (Mar. 1936);
- “Red 71″ (Dec. 1932);
- “Trouble Chaser” (Apr. 1934)
BOOKS
Fast One (1934), originally printed as five stories in Black Mask (Mar., Apr., June., Aug., and Sept. 1932); Seven Slayers (1945)
