Due in part to the classic films adapted from his novels, James M. Cain has become synonymous with the hard-boiled genre of literature. His novels and stories are brief and terse, his style informal and unpretentious, his themes unclouded by lofty philosophy, his outlook pessimistic. Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "There is perhaps no writer more faithful to the mythologies of America than Cain, for he writes of its ideals and hatred without obscuring them in the difficulties of art." It is no surprise, then, that from his novels, Hollywood would craft some of its most noirish and memorable films of the 1940s: Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Born James Mallahan Cain on July 1, 1892 in Annapolis, Maryland, he claims that he was struck by the impulse to become a writer while sitting on a park bench in 1914, in Washington, D.C., near the White House. He felt a voice inside him say, "You're going to be a writer." Years later, Cain recalled, "I've thought about it a thousand times, trying to figure out why that voice said what it did -- without success. There must have been something that had been gnawing at me from inside. But if there was, I have no recollection of it, nor did I have any realization that the decision I'd made wasn't mine to make."

The sudden inspiration to become a writer was not such a radical change in career paths. He was raised in an atmosphere of arts and education, his father being the president of Washington College. He earned his bachelors degree at Washington in 1910, with the aspiration of becoming an opera singer. But fame had not come quickly, and he had been forced to work at a series of odd jobs. At the time he sat on the fateful park bench, he had recently quit his job selling records in a department store, and written off the idea of a music career. Re-focusing his attention on creative writing, Cain returned to Washington College and obtained an M.A. in 1917.

Again, he found the transition from academic artist to professional artist was not an easy one. Cain submitted numerous short stories to magazines without any success. "In a year or more of trying, I didn't make one sale, until the thing became ridiculous and I was horribly self-conscious about it, to the point where self-respect, if nothing else, demanded that I quit."

Cain's concerns about self-image were dwarfed by greater concerns, when he was drafted into military service near the end of World War I. He was involved in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, but proved himself more valuable to the Headquarters Troop of the American Expeditionary Forces as editor of Lorraine Cross, the official newspaper of the 79th Division in France. After the war, his editorial experience made it easier for Cain to find work, and he began contributing articles to the Baltimore American (circa 1918) and then the Baltimore Sun (circa 1919-1923).

Returning to academia, Cain taught journalism at St. John's College, while working his way up the journalistic ladder, writing essays for the New York World and later, H.L. Mencken's American Mercury. Cain specialized in socio-political reportage, laced with humor and emphasizing the regional vernacular of the subjects.

"No writer would be telling the truth if he said he didn't think about style, for his style is the very pattern and weave and dye of his work. Yet I confess I usually read comments on this style with some surprise, for I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."

This relaxed literary style would become Cain's signature, and one finds it being employed in his first major work of fiction, "Pastorale," a gruesome crime story published in the March, 1928, issue of American Mercury:

"So Burbie dug the grave. He dug for two hours, until he got so damn tired he couldn't hardly stand up. But he ain't hardly made no hole at all. 'Cause the ground is froze and even with the pick he couldn't hardly make a dent in it scarcely. But anyhow Hutch stopped him and they throwed the old man in and covered him up. But after they got him covered up his head was sticking out. So Hutch beat the head down good as he could and piled the dirt up around it and they got in and drove off."

"Pastorale" and the editorial pieces he wrote for other publications (including The New Yorker, where he briefly served as managing editor) earned Cain an offer of employment in Hollywood. This occurred in 1931, shortly after the talkies were born, and when all the studios were casting out their nets for writers who specialized in dialogue. Cain's gift for dialect caught Paramount's attention, and he was brought to California for a slot in their screenwriting department. It took several years for the studios to realize that screenwriting is as much a visual medium as oral, and moviegoers had to suffer through a great many dialogue-heavy films until a proper balance was achieved. During this time, Cain never distinguished himself at screenwriting. He was first assigned to a talkie remake of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1923). The project never got off the ground, though DeMille did eventually remake the film, more than 30 years later.

Biographer Roy Hoopes quotes Cain as remarking, "I wanted the picture money...and I worked like a dog to get it. I parked my pride, my esthetic convictions, my mind outside on the street, and did everything to be a success in this highly paid trade... [but] even working in a whorehouse, the girl has to like the work a little bit, and I could not like pictures." Hoopes estimates Cain earned $388,000 from his stint in Hollywood, both as a salaried writer and in advances paid for screen rights to his work.

Much of Hollywood's interest in Cain was a result of the notoriety of his 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. The inspiration came as a result of Cain's recreational motoring on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He often filled his tank and his stomach at a particular gas station/cafe, where "this bosomy-looking thing comes out -- commonplace, but sexy, the kind you have ideas about...One day I read in the paper where a woman who runs a filling station knocked off her husband. Can it be this bosomy thing? I go by and sure enough the place is closed. In inquire. Yes, she's the one -- this appetizing but utterly commonplace woman."

Borrowing some details from the Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray murder case of 1927, Cain created a terse tale of a crime of passion gone sour, told in his trademark rural style. The novel deviated from the conventional crime story in one significant way. "Murder," Cain wrote, "had always been written from its least interesting angle, which was whether the police would catch the murderer. I was considering...a story in which murder was the love-rack [a term coined by writer Vincent Lawrence for the dramatic obstacle that separates two lovers], as it must be to any man and woman who conspire to commit it. But, I said, they would commit the perfect murder. It wouldn't go, of course, quite as they planned it. But in the end they would get away with it, and then what? They would find, I said, that the earth is not big enough for two persons who share such a dreadful secret, and eventually turn on each other."

The manuscript was originally entitled Bar-B-Q, but reached print in 1934 as The Postman Always Rings Twice. It was Cain's breakthrough. It landed on the best-seller list and won rave reviews. MGM purchased the screen rights for $25,000, but was unable to craft a script capable of squeaking past the censors (the property was purchased at the most inconvenient time: the end of the liberal Pre-Code Era). It wasn't until 1946 that it reached the screen, in a somewhat tame version starring Lana Turner and John Garfield.

Cain followed up Postman with a novella, serialized in eight installments in Liberty magazine in 1936 entitled Double Indemnity. Paramount acquired the rights and in 1943 began developing the project for director Billy Wilder. Among the screenwriters was Raymond Chandler, who did not particularly enjoy the assignment, remarking, "It has always irritated me to be associated with Cain... I'm not in the least like Cain... Cain is writer of the faux naif type, which I particularly dislike." Wilder's usual writing partner, Charles Brackett, declined the project, citing moral objections to Cain's grim story of another crime of passion gone sour.

Cain worked on numerous projects at Paramount, then moved on to other companies, but only received screen credit on three films: Blockade (1938, Walter Wanger), Algiers (1938, Walter Wanger), and Stand Up and Fight (1939, MGM). Ironically, during his less-than-fruitful years as a staff screenwriter, his original works were finding greater demand. The 1933 short story "The Baby in the Icebox" (which he sold to Paramount for $1,000) reached the screen in 1934 as She Made Her Bed, while 20th Century-Fox adapted his early novella Two Can Sing (aka Career in C Major, released as Wife, Husband and Friend [1939]). In every case, Cain was not hired to write the script. Maybe it was for the best, because Cain himself admitted in 1942, "I, who had found the newspaper business quite suited to my talents, and had usually been the white-headed boy of editors, now found there was one kind of writing I was no good at: I couldn't write pictures."

Disgusted by the way writers were treated by the Hollywood studios, Cain formed the American Authors' Authority in 1946 to negotiate for writer's rights, but the organization quickly dissolved. The nature of Cain's complaint is hinted at in the 1937 novel Serenade, published while he was working as a staff screenwriter. The character speaking is (like Cain) a frustrated opera singer: "I didn't like Hollywood. I didn't like it partly because of the way they treated a singer, and partly because of the way they treated her. To them, singing is just something you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something that hasn't occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake is a producer that couldn't tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn't know a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for him one night, that can't read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made, that can't even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing, literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent him Clark Gable to play in it."

In 1943, Cain defended the pessimistic tone of his work, "Our national curse, if so perfect a land can have such a thing, is the 'sympathetic' character. We love our Christmas Speert. My friends, I take exception to this idealism, as the Duke of Wellington is said to have taken exception to a lady's idealism when he told her, 'Madam, the Battle of Waterloo was won by the worst set of blackguards ever assembled in one spot on this earth.' The world's great literature is peopled by thorough-going heels."

His 1941 novel Mildred Pierce was one of the few Cain stories to achieve success outside the realm of crime fiction. Although the plot pivots on an act of murder, it has become acclaimed as a snapshot of American attitudes toward working women in the WWII era. Michael Curtiz's 1945 film, starring Joan Crawford in an Oscar®-winning performance, is considered a landmark melodrama, influential film noir, and simply one of the most important films ever made. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1996, where it joined Double Indemnity, which had been honored in 1992.

Cain was married four times, first to childhood sweetheart Mary Rebekah Clough (1920-1927), then to the Finnish woman Elina Sjostedt Tyszecka (1927-1942). In 1944-45, he was briefly wed to a mutual friend of his and Mencken's, silent movie star Aileen Pringle (Tod Browning's The Mystic [1925]). The marriage was tumultuous and short-lived. In later years, Pringle remarked, "If I had remained married to that psychotic Cain, I would be wearing a straight jacket."

In 1947, Cain married opera singer Florence Macbeth, who was once the Primadonna of the Chicago Civic Opera. She had also been Cain's idol during his late teens and early twenties, when he was infatuated with classical music (an interest that is reflected in his novel Serenade [1937] and novella Two Can Sing [1938]). It must have been extremely gratifying to finally meet the object of his adolescent affection... and actually marry her. Further revisiting his youth, Cain moved back to Maryland the same year, to the town of Hyattsville, where he and Macbeth lived until her death in 1966.

As years passed, Cain endeavored to break the mold from which The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity were cast. He wrote an Erskine Caldwell-like story of incest (Butterfly [1947], adapted to film in 1982, starring Pia Zadora and Stacy Keach), historical novels set in 1850s Nevada (Past All Dishonor [1946] and the Reconstruction Mignon [1965], both unfilmed), a Dreiser-esque Depression-era drama (The Moth [1948], which he claimed as his personal favorite), and a medical melodrama (The Institute [1976]). His return to the genre that had made him famous -- The Magician's Wife (1965) -- was poorly received, and seemed to indicate that the gift for criminal passion gone awry had grown cold from disuse.

The further Cain strayed from what the public considered his forte -- hard-boiled crime -- the more his reputation as a writer was compromised. His efforts at writing "serious" novels seemed to diffuse his reputation and expose the narrowness of his talent.

In her 1968 essay "Man Under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain," Joyce Carol Oates attempts to nail shut the writer's reputation (Cain was at the time actively writing, trying to reinvent himself). "A world immense with freedom, women hellish and infantile by turns, money, power, the tantalizing promise of adventure -- these are the common elements of James M. Cain's novels...Though he deals constantly with the Artistic, Cain, it will be said, never manages to become an artist; there is always something sleazy, something eerily vulgar and disappointing in his work." She remarks that his work has been overshadowed by Camus and Godard, and "any number of cryptic realists who can give us Cain's pace and excitement without Cain's flaws." Four decades have passed since Oates's essay was published, and have proven her wrong. While the audience for Camus and Godard shrinks by the year, Cain's brazenly proletarian prose seems to be immortal. While his non-crime novels have faded into obscurity, Cain's prime works endure. They continue to be reprinted and find new readers as each generation experiences its own resurgence of interest in pulp fiction, film noir, and lowbrow culture.

Many writers and filmmakers continue to be influenced by Cain - most obviously Joel and Ethan Coen, whose morally-ambiguous, not-exceptionally-bright protagonists are ripped right out of the pulpy pages of Cain's early novellas, as are the moments of gruesome humor and the overriding sense of fatalism that flavor their rural films noir.

Cain died on October 27, 1977, back home in Maryland, about 25 miles from the town where his life had begun.

by Bret Wood