James M. Cain

THE AUTHOR | BIBLIOGRAPHY | VIEWS AND QUOTES

After the fall

For a time, I thought of James M. Cain as an also-ran of American writing. On the third or fourth pillar below the greats in the literary pantheon. In the less exalted gallery of crime writers, he would come well after the holy trinity of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald—a commercial writer who never really rose above his magazine origins.

But reading his slender, sensationally successful novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, led me to trying the meatier Mildred Pierce. Then his less celebrated works of that early period. Then his later works. And his stories.

And a disturbing thing happened. Cain became one of my favourite writers. Uneven maybe but always interesting.

And I started noticing other readers quietly regarded him as an American master. Quietly because no literary person wants to be caught praising books labelled potboilers of sex and violence.

Even early in his career Cain's work was dismissed as lightweight. His first works were called imitations of Hemingway, despite his not having previously read the younger writer. As Cain's books were being turned into films, Raymond Chandler summed up a disparaging view of his rival in a letter to a publisher:

He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, 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.

Cain was also taken to be a hardboiled writer, another label at which he bridled, as if he only served up tough protagonists in cynical works suited to film noir adaptation. He saw himself as exploring what happens to people who achieve their dark dreams and cannot live with the consequences. But novelist James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) complained "writing like Cain's exploits rather than explores the material of life in America".

It is hard to understand this criticism today. Much of Cain's writing was undeniably sensationalistic and often dealt with lowlife characters, but since then we've seen more explicit and grittier work from highly regarded writers.

Maybe it's the plot-driven nature of Cain's work that offends, that makes "serious" writers want to class him as merely popular. While Chandler may be acclaimed for writing great scenes between characters, Cain writes enticing situations to put them in.

True, often his charcters' reactions seem rushed as if the writer's in a hurry to get to the next development. To be fair though, his less-than-admirable characters are usually telling the stories in their own rough voices, so it makes sense the narratives don't come out like character studies suited to academic study. They do come with brilliantly colloquial narration.

And wonderfully real dialogue. Cain went further than most writers of his time in moving stories ahead through dialogue. Pages filled with brisk exchanges feathered in quotation marks, with nary a "he said" or "she said" to interrupt them.

Early success

Cain developed this quote-heavy style with his early creative writing for magazines—sketches heavy on speech and straight dialogues, and eventually short stories and serials, most narrated in a lower-class vernacular. A memorable dialogue of this period is "Theological Interlude" (1928), in which two parents and an uncle discuss a daughter's near-death experience and her subsequent running off with a preacher. Among his popular writing at this time is "Pastorale" (1928), a macabre tale of small-town murder and mayhem.

Cain's first book, Our Government (1930), collected some of these early short pieces, though many others were never published in book form until decades later or even posthumously.

That first book led Cain to a brief job in Hollywood as a screenwriter, at which he flopped. But he kept writing stories, and one of them, "The Baby in the Icebox" (1932), won greater fame, even being adapted for a movie, She Made Her Bed. The story showed his ability to take a plot concerning ordinary people doing extraordinary things and compress it into a believable story. (The original title may have been too grisly for Hollywood, but it's actually both accurate and misleading.)

In 1933, Cain was enticed back to Hollywood, where he spent fifteen years, making big salaries from studios while producing few scripts but turning out successful stories.

Among his best known in this decade are "Dead Man" (1932), about a young drifter who accidentally kills a railroad cop, and "The Girl in the Storm" (1939), about another drifter and young woman who take shelter together in a deserted gas station.

The acclaim for his stories created pressure on Cain to write his first novel. The Postman Always Rings Twice, published in 1934 when Cain was well into his forties, is too short to be considered more than a novella. But its tale of a drifter (the narrator) conspiring in murder with the wife of a roadside diner owner packs as much development and emotional wallop as most books twice as long. It also shows the extension of the theme that had become a staple of Cain's stories, as well as shaping up as the story of his own life: success leading to a fall. The book was a commercial and critical smash and has been made into films several times, including the John Garfield and Lana Turner vehicle of the same name in 1946.

In 1936 a magazine bought another Cain novella for serialization: Double Indemnity. It wasn't released in book form until 1943, partly because Cain himself criticized it as "tripe". He admitted he wrote it to cash in on his fame as author of Postman and the two narratives do bear certain similarities: a man and a woman team up to kill her husband but turn on each other afterwards. But it was another sensation and made another hit movie, the film noir classic starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck (actually coming out two years before the American Postman film).

Postman and Indemnity were followed by Serenade (1937), a longer story told by a washed-up, possibly bisexual American opera singer hiding in Mexico where he hooks up with a prostitute who becomes the love of his life. The novel is neglected today, but it's an exhilarating ride. From beginning to end, the story moves in directions no reader could anticipate, yet it is credible and involving. And surprisingly moving. (Nearly two decades later it was scrubbed clean of sexuality and made into a Hollywood movie starring the operatic Mario Lanza, who was a big Cain fan.)

Mildred Pierce (1941) is Cain's first major work to be told in the third person. I follows the relationship of a successful restaurateur and her spoiled daughter. Cain considered it inferior, lacking the bite of his first-person narratives. But it's a terrific novel of social realism. However, when Hollywood made it into a Joan Crawford vehicle in 1945, it became another film noir murder mystery. It wasn't until 2011 that a made-for TV serial did Cain's novel justice.

The long fall

Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942) was one of Cain's first commercial misses during his Hollywood period. The tightly written story of love, lust, and crooked politics in a corrupt town resembles Dashiell Hammett's much praised The Glass Key. But during the Second World War it struck an unpatriotic chord and failed to find a publisher or readers immediately, although a heavily panned film was made of it in 1956 under the name Slightly Scarlet. Several other projects—screenplays, serials and novels—never saw the light of day at all.

Two books that did do well—becoming his biggest sellers in fact—were Past All Dishonor (1946) and The Butterfly (1947), both unusual entries in Cain's canon. Past All Dishonor is historically based, telling in the writer's most colloquial style the tragic romance between a Confederate spy and a prostitute in California of the 1860s. The Butterfly was a slim, fast-paced story of greed, incest, and murder in the hills of 1930s Kentucky, remembered as one of Cain's least substantial efforts and the basis for one of the worst reviewed movies ever, a 1982 film starring Pia Zadora.

A large commercial disappointment followed Butterfly. Cain considered The Moth (1948) his best novel but it sold poorly. And so he left Hollywood for the last time, as a self-described failure.

Over the last three decades of his life he continued to write novels of different kinds, some that sold moderately, some that didn't, and some that were never published. Most were throwbacks in theme and language to previous years. When he died he was working on a new novel, The Cocktail Waitress, a throwback to his old style that was not to be published (to acclaim) until thirty-five years later.

In his final years of life, Cain experienced a resurgence of interest in his work. What he referred to as his "reincarnation" was kicked off by the publication in 1969 of Cain X 3 (1969), which placed his old hits, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, between hardcovers again.

For a certain period of his late career, as with some other writers of his era (Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara come to mind), Cain's work was thought of as being of a certain short-lived era—the 1930s and early 1940s in his case. He was perceived as not keeping up with the concerns of subsequent generations of readers who moved on to new writers.

But now we are so many generations further along, we have a longer perspective on Cain's work. We can go back and pick out the best from the mixed bag that is James M. Cain's work. Not only need we not agree with the esteemed critics of the time but we need not accept the author's own judgments. Cain was not always his own best critic.

Yes, much of his work was done for fame and money. And, yes, much of it is overheated (at least for its time). But we don't hold either of those charges against other great writers in history.

Time to see with clear eyes where the best of Cain's work should place him in the pantheon.

— Eric

 

THE AUTHOR | BIBLIOGRAPHY | VIEWS AND QUOTES

See also:

Dashiell Hammett

Raymond Chandler

Ross Macdonald

Ernest Hemingway

Buy the book:

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Mildred Pierce

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