William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Paul Cain
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Paul Cain arrived at Black Mask in 1932, when the magazine neared its zenith. He was born George Sims in Iowa in 1902, but he wrote as "Paul Cain" and scripted movies as "Peter Ruric." He grew up on the grim side of Chicago and claimed to have "traveled extensively in Central and South America, the West Indies, Europe, Northern Africa and the Near East, been a bosun's mate on tramps, a … Dada painter [and] a professional gambler." 1 Almost no objective biographical information exists about the twenty-nine years of his life before he submitted his first hard-boiled story to "Cap" Shaw in 1932. "Fast One" featured the quick-shooting gambler Gerry Kells, a tough guy paradigm. Three more Kells stories formed the basis of the novel Fast One, a landmark hard-boiled novel. Cain "picks up his literary scalpel and [cuts] away conjunctions as if they were bad merchandise," wrote novelist Irvin Faust. "He digs into the page with a hard sentence: simple, declarative, exact." "Cap" Shaw called him "an aesthete in taste and ambition. Allied with his aesthetic moods is a grim sense of realism in its hardest texture." Cain himself wrote that he liked "Mercedes motor cars, peanut butter… Scotch whiskey, some of the paintings of [de] Chirico, gardenias, vegetables and sour cream, [and Greta] Garbo." 2
When Shaw was fired from Black Mask in 1936, Cain left too. He had published only seventeen stories in four years, plus his novel. He went on, however, to have a successful career as scriptwriter Peter Ruric, writing Gambling Ship (Paramount, 1933), The Black Cat for Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff (Universal, 1934), and many other successful movies. In 1943 he worked for M.G.M. and in 1944 for R.K.O., where he teamed with director Robert Wise and producer Val Lewton on Mademoiselle Fifi. Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic James Agee liked Cain's "well-edged script" for the latter, which "signifies that there is one group of men working in Hollywood who have neither lost nor taken care to conceal the purity of their hope and intention." 3
Sickness kept Cain out of print for a while, then he returned to write food features for Gourmet in the 1950s and to script television shows in the 1960s. He died in 1966 in Los Angeles at age sixty-four. He published no novels besides Fast One, but Raymond Chandler termed that novel the "high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner." Its final scene, he said, was "as murderous and at the same time poignant as anything in that manner that has ever been written." 4 Much of Cain's work has recently been collected and reissued.
2 Cain, Faust, and Shaw in Nolan,197-98.
3Agee in Nolan, Black Mask, 199.
4 Chandler in Nolan, Black Mask, 199-200.