"I, so far as I can sense the pattern of my mind, write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination. . . . I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this,...

Although he disliked the title, James M. Cain (1892-1977) is considered one of the preeminent "hard-boiled" crime writers of the 1930s and 1940s along with Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler. His explicit, stark style both startled...

Her shoes should have warned him. The shoes that Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson wears in the 1944 Double Indemnity—pumps with an unsightly ruffle of tulle on the toe, bedroom slippers with a puff of marabou—tell you everything you ever need to know about her, everything...

Her shoes should have warned him. The shoes that Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson wears in the 1944 Double Indemnity—pumps with an unsightly ruffle of tulle on the toe, bedroom slippers with a puff of marabou—tell you everything you ever need to know about her,...

Delicate snares are everywhere in Lolita, and the tread of 50th anniversaries can be as crushing as Hallmark (and middle age). So let’s insist on this: The book is still brand-new, drying on the page, filled with play, prescience and humor. But if you want...

These novels [Double Indemnity, Career in C Major, and The Embezzler, collected in Three of a Kind], though written fairly recently, really belong to the Depression, rather than the War, and make interesting footnotes to an era. They also make, to anybody who finds me interesting, an interesting commentary on my own development as a novelist, and as I am probably the most mis-read, mis-reviewed, and misunderstood novelist now writing, this may be a good place to say a word about myself, my literary ideals, ...

Two things may be said about James M. Cain with the greatest assurance. One is that nothing he has ever written has been entirely out of the trash category. The other is that in spite of the cheapness which sooner or later finds its way into his novels, an inordinate number of intelligent and fully literate people have read him. He has been translated in many parts of the world, and writers whose stature makes him look stunted have paid him the compliment of imitating him—as Albert Camus did, for exa...

James M. Cain was a caustic writer of newspaper editorials who published his first novel at 42 and his 18th at 84. His short, squalid thrillers made him as famous as Hemingway in the '30s; often more purple than noir, they creaked with ludicrous plot contrivances and panting dialogue, but how the pages crackled! From the first sentence, pitching the reader headlong behind the headlines of tabloid murders, to the last irony, which sounded a note more in keeping with Puritan tribunals than the requisit...