James M Cain

(1892–1977)

Double Indemnity by James M Cain

Theatr Clwyd, 1996

HEELS AND HARPIES

James M Cain has been called “the twenty-minute egg of the hard-boiled school”. He is usually grouped with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in that tough-guy genre of American writing that still acts as a blueprint for many of today’s anti-heroes. But even in their time his works struck a certain intellectual chord: French author and philosopher Albert Camus, no less, once admitted that Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was a model for his existential masterpiece L’étranger.

The Road West

In Cain’s case the style was not the man, but rather the result of talent, hard work and years of apprenticeship in factual journalism. He was born James Mallahan Cain on 1 July 1892 at Annapolis, Maryland and educated at Washington College where his father was president. Academic ability obviously ran in the family because the young Cain gained his BA at the early age of 18, and went straight to work writing for the Baltimore American. (His earliest ambition had been to be a professional singer like his mother, but after much study he decided his voice wasn’t good enough.) In the Great War he served in France with the 79th Division of the American Expeditionary Forces, editing the battalion’s official newspaper, and on returning to the States he moved to the Baltimore Sun, then the New York World where he wrote a weekly political column until 1931.

He was first encouraged to write by HL Mencken, the leading light of American journalism who had known Cain since his years on the Baltimore paper. Cain’s first stories and plays subsequently appeared in the American Mercury, but it was the publication of his first novel, the bestseller The Postman Always Rings Twice, that allowed him to abandon journalism for good. When Hollywood discovered that his psychological thrillers were just the stuff to fuel the film noir boom during the war years, Cain moved to Los Angeles to be closer to the productions, where he continued to turn out a stream of powerful, distinctive works. For the rest of his life he lived mostly on the West Coast and married four times.

Hollywood

As a writer, Cain was active for fifty years, from his first one-act plays in the mid-twenties to his final novel, The Institute, published in 1976. But apart from the kind of tough thrillers most associated with his name, he also wrote romances and historical novels. In 1936 his own stage adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice met with some success, and seven years later it was the neo-realist Italian film version of the same book, under the title Ossessione, which launched 36-year-old Italian aristocrat Lucino Visconti on his directorial career.

Cain collaborated on five screenplays himself, but none of the resulting films made as much impact as the screen versions adapted by others from his best-known novels. Double Indemnity (1944) was instantly hailed as a classic, while Mildred Pierce the following year was the quintessential ‘woman’s picture’ which saved the career of Joan Crawford. Lana Turner’s steamy turn in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) so impressed the author that he gave the actress a leather-bound copy of the novel inscribed “For my dear Lana, thank you for giving a performance that was even finer than I expected.”

Cain was a dark, burly man who looked, according to one contemporary, more like a schoolmaster or an amiable priest than a sophisticated novelist. Certainly his books, for all their surface toughness, were the work of a first-class literary mind, just like Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s, whose popular success was in no way compromised by their popularisation through Hollywood.

The Love-Rack

The disciplines of both media complemented each other. Cain’s work is characterised by economy of scene setting, astute psychological insight and a musician’s ear for the natural rhythms of American speech. As for themes, he had a marked preference for sex and money, as linked through a pair of obsessive lovers. “I write of the wish that comes true,” he once said, “for some reason a terrifying concept.” In order to fulfil their fantasies, Cain’s ‘heels and harpies’ invariably set out on a course of destruction which will place them beyond the pale of society and leave them eventually pinioned on what he called the ‘love-rack’.

Crime is the method by which his characters work out their destinies, charting the way the American dream degenerates into nightmare. His male protagonists tend to be streetwise grifters with an eye to the main chance but doomed to fall in love with the least suitable female fate can find for them. She, for her part, is calculating, ruthless, acquisitive, and would sooner commit a murder than violate a social taboo. Together, the pair will consume each other in a spiral of greed, piling sin on sin until retribution finally and inexorably overwhelms then in the final reel.

In Tune with the Times

Like many of his peers in the genre, Cain derived his muscular prose style through assiduous use of the first-person narrative. This, along with a limited cast of characters and a simple plot-line, made up his strong, distinctive voice. His books were as cold as an automatic pressed against the back of the neck, but they moved with the speed of an express train. He developed, as he put it, “the habit of needling a story at the least hint of a breakdown” to produce a “rising coefficient of intensity”.

But it is perhaps significant that the heyday of his success was the early forties. His style and themes were very much of their time, their astringent and cynical tone chiming well with a world suffering hardship and war. But in the aftermath, when so many had been through so much, the amoral paths chosen by his obsessive men and women seemed less shocking, even understandable. By 1981, when Pia Zadora and Stacy Keach starred in a lacklustre film version of Cain’s 1947 novel Butterfly, its story of incestuous love and murder had become to diluted by familiarity and cliché that it made little impact. Nevertheless, as David Madden points out in Twentieth Century American Literature, “as a consequence of his primary intention to tell a story superbly well, he has created an objective, disinterested, often pessimistic view of life that is simultaneously terrifying and starkly beautiful”.

James M Cain died on 27 October 1977.