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 ...
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"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...
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Critical Essay by W. M. Frohock
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 i...
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Critical Essay by John D. Macdonald
There is a special debt we owe them, a debt to Chandler, Hammett and Cain. They excised pointless ornamentation, moved their stories forward with a spare, ruthless ...
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Critical Essay by David Dempsey
One must read James M. Cain on his own terms. He is something more than a whodunit writer, something less than a serious novelist; but within the zone of psychological ...
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Critical Essay by Martin Levin
["Mignon"], James M. Cain's first novel in a decade, is nominally about the Civil War: period costumes aside, it barrels along like a private-eye es...
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Critical Essay by Granville Hicks
[The Magician's Wife], Cain's first novel in some time, follows in all essentials, as the publisher candidly admits, the pattern he developed more than ...
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Critical Essay by Tom Wolfe
Cain was one of those writers who first amazed and delighted me when I was old enough to start looking around and seeing what was being done in American literature. Steinbe...
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Critical Essay by Kevin Starr
If you have the courage, take a look this summer at [Cain x 3]…. Courage is needed because of an entire generation of tough-guy writers—Dashiell Hammett, Ra...
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Critical Essay by Gary Giddins
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 Hem...
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Critical Essay by Joe Flaherty
There is nothing in ["The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction"] that will enhance Cain's reputation or seduce new readers….
[The edito...
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Critical Essay by Harold Strauss
Every so often a writer turns up who forces us to revalue our notions of the realistic manner, for, no less than reality itself, it is relative and inconstant, dependi...
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Critical Essay by William Dubois
The title of ["Love's Lovely Counterfeit"] is all too descriptive. Bang it on your chair-arm when you have finished, and it will ring false as a p...
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Critical Essay by J.m.c.
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 th...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Stepanchev
In the preface to his new novel ["The Butterfly"] James M. Cain lashes back at Eastern critics who have accused him of imitating Ernest Hemingway and...
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Critical Essay by James Macbride
Merely by hefting this full-size volume ["The Moth"] the Cain addict will sense instantly that it is the Malibu maestro's most ambitious effort to...
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James Cain
James M(allahan) Cain
