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 date…. Unlike all of Mr. Cain's previous books, it is both full-bodied and chronological, taking a boy from boyhood to maturity, and doing its honest best to give that protagonist a third dimension. The present reader … can only report, in sorrow, that Mr. Cain's most ambitious novel is also his dullest….

When you've closed "The Moth" you may know just how to crack a cash register—or earn your living as a fruit-tramp. Jack Dillon remains a vaguely glimpsed stranger who has talked you to death, and beyond. And Mr. Cain's famous sense of pace, his knack with the wages-of-sin pattern, are lost in verbiage.

James MacBride, "Mr. Cain, Jumbo Size," in The New York Times Book Review (copyright © 1948 by The New York Times...