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...

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. Steinbeck, Farrell, Saroyan, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe were some of the others. But Cain—momentum was something he had a patent on. Or maybe acceleration is the word. Picking up a Cain novel was like climbing into a car with one of those Superstockers who is up to forty by the time your right leg is in the door. Today, twenty years later...

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, Raymond Chandler, B. Traven, Horace McCoy and others of the Southern California school—James M. Cain is possessed of the most brutal, elemental, and intrinsically pessimistic view of human events and possibilities. Only another Californian, Robinson Jeffers, working up the coast at Big Sur and in another genre, narrative poetry, matche...

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 of writing with the movies in mind. To the first charge he replies that he is older than Hemingway and that the essential characteristics of his swift, lean prose were evident in his short story "Pastorale" written in 1927 before he had seen any of Hemingway's work. To the second charge he replies that although he has learned...

There is nothing in ["The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction"] that will enhance Cain's reputation or seduce new readers…. [The editor] tells us that one of Cain's themes is the doom of joint guilt: When two people engage in an evil act, they cannot share their terrible secret and live on the same earth—they turn on each other. But to me, the theme that purrs in the engine of Cain's best work … is the proposition that love is dangerous. For Cai...

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, depending on the period, the fashion, the point of view. There is the feeling of realism, of intense realism, in James M. Cain's work, and yet he cannot be compared to such diverse types of realists as Zola, Ibsen, Sandburg, Dreiser, or Hemingway. It is the hard-boiled manner that has been heralded for some time, and is now upon us. It is the ...

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 cheekiness that he has staked out for exploration, he is a master craftsman. In "Galatea," which is southern Maryland, rather than southern California, Cain edges a little closer to the method of Graham Greene. His characters are endowed with a self-awareness of guilt, purged of their sins through violence rather than good deeds...

[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 thirty years ago. There is a minor variation in that the hero is not a more or less disreputable drifter but an up-and-coming executive of a meat-packing company…. This man, Clay Lockwood, stops for lunch at one of a chain of restaurants with which his firm does business, and is immediately impressed by the hostess…. After lunch h...

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 plugged quarter. But if you can stomach the first chapter, it will hold you to the end—even if the after-effect is comparable to a morning at the reptile-house in the zoo. (pp. 6-7) Mr. Cain's new novel is conceived in sin; like [his] others, it proves that the wages of sin is death. But "Love's Lovely Counterfeit&#x...

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 vigor and so superimposed the realities we already knew with characterizations we could believe, that they achieved a dreadful, and artistic, inevitability…. "The Institute" is a faint and embarrassing echo of the persuasion that used to be [Cain's]. It is not the intent of this reviewer to make a witless and vulgar di...

["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 escapade. Into New Orleans in the year 1864 comes Bill Cresap, invalided out of the Union Army and on the lookout for a stake. Before you can say Raymond Chandler, a Creole damsel in distress named Mignon Landry has appeared at Cresap's hotel room door, with a heartrending plea to get her daddy out of a military prison, where he has bee...

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…. Wh...