My January magazine review of Motherless Brooklyn is at
http://www.januarymagazine.com/crfiction/motherless.html
My take on Cain comes from his background: upper middle class
Maryland Catholic family. He went Washington College at a
time only the wealthy could. A soldier in WWI, then a
journalist. For a time he was Managing Editor of the New
Yorker. Most of what he wrote seems as if the upper class
goes slumming and then looks down its nose at what it sees
the lower class are like. In Postman, they are all animals .
. .and describe themselves as animals. They even rut like
animals. (They live mired in Original Sin?) If he never saw
himself as hard-boiled -- if Hammett, et. al, despised him --
maybe it was because he never shared the same values of the
hard-boiled POV, and they recognized his "rich kid slumming
in mud" attitude.
Frederick Zackel
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