Mike mentioned the contempt in which Chandler and some others
held James M. Cain. I hadn't known that, so I looked up Cain
in the index of Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler.
"Contempt" is putting it lightly:
"Most of all perhaps, in my rather sensitive mind, I hope the
day will come when I won't have to ride around on Hammett and
James Cain, like an organ grinder's monkey. Hammett is all
right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he
could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain
-- faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He
is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in
greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and
a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal
of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but
because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and
cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in
the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do
I, for God's sake, sound like that? Hemingway with his
eternal sleeping bag got to be pretty damn tiresome, but at
least Hemingway sees it all, not just the flies on the
garbage can."
Mark
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