James Cain Biography and List of Works

American journalist, screenwriter, and novelist identified with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and others as a member of hard-boiled school of crime fiction. Three of Cain's novels - THE POSTMAN ALLWAYS RINGS TWICE (1934), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1936), and MILDRED PIERCE (1941) - were also made into classics of the American screen. His books continued to appear after World War II, but none approached the success of his earlier work.

"I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."
(Cain in preface to Double Indemnity)

Cain was born in Annapolis, the son of an educator and an opera singer. He studied at Washington College, in Chesterton, Maryland, earning his B.A. at the age of eighteen, and masters in 1917. Cain worked as a clerk, a meat-packer, a singer, and a teacher, searching for something worthwhile to do.

During World War I he was the editor of the 79th Division newspaper Lorraine Cross in France. Decades later he returned to his war experiences in the short story 'Taking of Mountfaucon'. "And what we was walking over was all shell holes and barbed wire, and you was always slipping down and busting your shin, and then all them dead horses and things was laying around, and you didn't never see one till you had your foot in it, and then it made you sick. And dead men. The first one we seen was in a trench, kind of laying up against the side, what was on a slant. And he was sighting down his gun just like he was getting ready to pull the trigger, and when you come to him you opened your mouth to beg his pardon for bothering him. And then you didn't."

After the war Cain worked for the Baltimore American (1917-18) and Baltimore Sun (1919-23), where he covered political and industrial strife in West Virginia. From 1923 to 1924 he was Professor of Journalism at St. John's College, Anapolis. In 1924 he become editorial writer for the New York World under Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). Cain conducted a column which became the basis for OUR GOVERNMENT, a candid look at American policy.

In 1928 H.L. Mencen, whom Cain had met while working for the Baltimore American, published in American Mercury his story 'Pastorale', which dealt with a grisly murder humorously after the style of Ring Lardner. Following the end of the World, Cain joined New Yorker staff in 1931 for a year. However, he found the environment uncongenial and moved to Hollywood. From 1932 to 1947 he lived in Southern California writing for films.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (originally entitled Bar-B-Que) is loosely based on an actual case. The story depicts a California drifter, Frank Chambers, who falls in love with Cora Papadakis, the beautiful wife of a diner owner, who together murder her husband, making his death look like accident. Cora dies in a car crash and ironically Frank is convicted of murder for her truly accidental death. The book was steamy enough to be banned in Canada and in Boston and gave rise to a trial for obscenity.

'Who's going to know if it's all right or not, but you and me?'
'You and me.'
'That's it, Frank. That's all that matters, isn't it? Not you and me and the road, or anything else but you and me.'
(from The Postman Always Rings Twice)

Double Indemnity, a tale of an adulterous couple who try to commit the perfect insurance murder, was first serialized in Liberty magazine. Mildred Pierce centres on a ambitious woman, who loses her wealth through the intrigues of her ex-husband, her partner and selfish daughter. The story is told in a third-person narrative, creating with his 'masculine' style a tension within a generally sympathetic portrait of a woman.

In later years Cain returned to Maryland. He married for the third time in 1947 and settled in Hyattsville, where he remained until his death. His later works include BUTTERFLY (1947), a story of incest and murder in Kentucky, THE MOTH (1948), his personal favourite set in Baltimore, and historical novels PAST ALL DISHONOR (1946), and MIGNON (1962), set in the years after the Civil War.

During his last years Cain occupied himself with classical music - his fourth wife was the opera singer Florence Macbeth Whitwell - and the study of Shakespeare's sonnets. In 1970 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. James M.Cain died on October 27, 1977, in Hyattsville, Md.

"This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn't even be a murder. It was going to be just a regular road accident, with guys drunk, and booze in the car, and all the rest. "
(from The Postman Always Rings Twice)

Cain's novels are written in an economical but highly effective style. Sentences last only as long as it would take for the action they describe to occur in real time. Cain generally prefers a first-person narrator, he avoids moralizing, and his characters are often self-destructive and acting under forces that they are incapable of understanding. In France Cain was regarded as the essence of American cool. The Postman Always Rings Twice was the inspiration for The Outsider by Albert Camus. However, Raymond Chandler was not very enthusiastic about Cain and dismissed him as 'a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody watching'.

Double Indemnity (1944), dir by Billy Wilder (1944), starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. Wilder first offered the role of corrupt insurance man to Alan Ladd and George Raft, among others. Wilder's film is quintessential film noir. The smart and cocky male protagonist who falls into the spider woman's web is a recurrent theme in the genre (eg The Killers, 1946; Out of the Past, 1947; Body Heat, 1981 etc). In the original ending to the film, MacMurray is convicted for murder and Robinson witnesses his death in the gas chamber in San Quentin.

For further reading: Literature and Morality by J.T. Farrell (1947); Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. by David Madden - see: Joyce Carol Oates, (1968); Cain by David Madden (1970); Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain by Roy Hoopes (1982); Cain by R. Hoopes (1987); James M. Cain by P. Skenazy (1989); The Crime Novel by T. Hilfer (1990); Encyclopeadia of World Literature in the 2oth Century, ed. by Steven R. Derafin (1999, vol. 1).

THEOLOGICAL INTERLUDE, (1928)
CITIZENSHIP, (1928)
OUR GOVERNMENT, (1930)
THE POSTMAN ALLWAYS RINGS TWICE, (1934)
DOUBLE INDEMNITY, (1936)
SERENADE, (1937)
MILDRED PIERCE, (1941)
LOVE'S LOVELY COUNTERFEIT, (1942)
CAREER IN C MAJOR AND OTHER STORIES, (1943)
THREE OF A KIND: CAREER IN C MAJOR, THE EMBEZZLER, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, (1944)
FOR MEN ONLY, (1944)
PAST ALL DISHONOUR, (1946)
THE BUTTERFLY, (1947)
THE MOTH, (1948)
SINFUL WOMAN, (1948)
THREE OF HEARTS, (1949)
JEALOUS WOMAN, (1949)
THE ROOT OF HIS EVIL, (1952)
GALATEA, (1953)
MIGNON, (1962)
THE MAGICIAN'S WIFE, (1965)
CAIN X 3, (1969)
RAINBOW'S END, (1975)
THE INSTITUTE, (1976)
THE BABY IN THE ICEBOX AND OTHER SHORT FICTION, (1981)
CLOUD NINE, (1984)
THE ENCHANTED ISLE, (1985)
60 YEARS OF JOURNALISM, (1985)
CAREER IN C MAJOR AND OTHER FICTION, (1986)
THE JAMES M. CAIN COOKBOOK, (1988)