<<I don't think we would have a Jim Thompson or a
Willeford without Cain
blazing the trail here. Probably not a McCoy or an Ellroy
either.>>
Thompson, Willeford, Ellroy, yes; but McCoy did his best work
before
Cain published Postman.
<<Maybe someone else did these novels of an
unrepentant, unapologetic
killer before, but I can't think of one.>>
I can't think of a novel before Postman that does this.
However, there
were so many writers working for the pulps that someone is
bound to have
done it - those old pulp stories could be tremendously
callous.
<<Nowadays the idea has, of course, been done to
death.>>
Indeed, indeed. Too much of a bad thing.
<<but it must have been shockingly fresh when it first
came out and I
still find Cain's compassionate handling of it very
compelling. In fact
I think he is better than Thompson in developing the
reader's
identification with the killer and in teasing out the hopes
that the
killer will somehow get away with it.....while at the same
time
emphasising the innocence of the victim. Hard
trick.>>
I agree. Thompson bowls the reader over by being weird, and
he was a
genius at that game. But Cain's characters are relatively
ordinary
people, who speak and act like average citizens.
<<Then too, he was one of the first, if not the first,
of the writers in
the genre for whom irony was not just an occassional effect
but the
penultimate effect that the book aimed for.>>
I would attribute that honor to the great Norbert Davis -
however, as
old-timers know, I am unlikely to rank anybody higher than
Davis.
In Cain there is a lot of irony, but also melodrama. Cain
wrote
somewhere that despising melodrama was a bad thing for a
writer. The
special kind of hardboiled melodrama that he invented fed
several
generations, as you point out above. What I most admire in
Cain is his
ability to compress the action of a story and move it
forward
relentlessly (but the reader doesn't feel choked), with no
padding.
_Postman_ and _Double Indemnity_ are (at least by current
standards)
very short books, but because of this special ability of
Cain's to
condense the action, they contain much more material than
novels three
times their size.
I would also claim that Cain is in the same league as Hammett
and
Whitfield when it comes to terse, perfect dialogue, but that
Cain is
thematically much richer - mainly because he doesn't deal
with mysteries
but with crime fiction involving ordinary people. Shall we
credit him
with inventing "crime fiction" too?
Regards,
Mario Taboada (trying to catch up with a lot of messages
after a short
trip)
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