James Cain is one of those authors that critics love to hate.
Edmund Wilson, in his infamous "Boys in the Back Room" essay,
called him a poet of tabloid murder and accused him of using
cheap Hollywood tricks. Joyce Carol Oates, in an essay in
Madden's TOUGH GUY WRITERS OF THE THIRTIES, called his
writing sleazy and vulgar. Frohock, belatedly sensing the
drift of critical opinion, deleted the chapter on Cain from
the second edition of his THE NOVEL OF VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
and stated in the introduction that everything Cain wrote was
trash. Shaw, in THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL OF VIOLENCE, did
little more than damn him with faint praise. Even Raymond
Chandler got on the bandwagon, calling Cain "a dirty little
boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody
looking." This did not stop Chandler from writing the
screenplay for DOUBLE INDEMNITY.
James Cain, born in 1892 in Annapolis, got his Masters degree
from Washington College in 1917. During World War I he
editted an army newspaper in France. After the war he worked
for a couple Baltimore newspapers and then became a Professor
of Journalism at St. John's College in 1923. In 1924 Mencken
helped him get an editorial position for the New York World
under Walter Lippmann, and in 1928 he published his story
"Pastorale" in Mencken's American Mercury. After a brief
stint on the staff of the New Yorker in 1931, Cain moved to
Southern California, where he alternated between writing
novels and movie scripts. His most famous novel, THE POSTMAN
ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, came out in 1934. DOUBLE INDEMNITY came
out in 1936. Both these books were turned into highly
acclaimed films. In 1970 he was awarded the title of Grand
Master by the Mystery Writers of America. With mixed success,
he continued to write up until his death in 1977. A few other
notable titles were MILDRED PIERCE, THE MOTH, and
SERENADE.
In THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, Frank Chambers is
booted out of the back of a truck and he walks off the
highway into a southern California diner and into Cora's
life. Although she's not extraordinarily beautiful, he is
drawn to her from the first moment. The fact that she's
married is only a minor concern. Cora, desperate to break
free from a miserable marriage, is equally attracted to Frank
and in the midst of a hot and steamy love affair they plot
her husband's murder.
Cain's POSTMAN is a powerful combination of alienation,
desperation, sex, and violence, told in a clean, driving,
straightforward style. His use of dialogue parallels
Hemingway, and is just as good. From early in his writing
career he was identified with the Black Mask hardboiled
school, and he denied and resented this, saying that he had
not read twenty pages of Hammett. Indeed, although it's hard
to miss the tough and colloquial element of the hardboiled
style, Cain's POSTMAN has a nurtured atmosphere of sweat,
fear, and desperation, and became a cornerstone in the birth
of a new genre, noir.
miker
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