Word: caine
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ALAND OF SHIFTLESS hobos, of freight train yards and greasy roadside lunch counters; a land of desperate losers, crooked insurance salesmen and small-time racketeers, of empty pockets and broken spirits. That was James M. Cain's America. If for Thomas Wolfe or Jack Kerouac The Road led to freedom, for Cain it was some kind of a prison, a vast, inescapable refuse pile for the hungry and homeless. The characters in Cain's books, most of them drifters and box-car bums, search desperately for a piece of anything to call home. And when they find...
Although he was born and educated in Maryland, Cain found his America out West, in Southern California. There he ultimately carved out his niche in the annals of American literature, with books like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. His hard-bitten, journalistic style would make him one of the most frequently imitated authors of this century. The Baby in the Icebox, and Other Short Fiction, a new collection of many of Cain's previously out of print early stories and dialogues, traces his development from a moderately well-known yet inconsequential magazine writer in the East...
From his beginnings as a writer, Cain was preoccupied with the common man. His characters were mostly poor workers or drifters who believed earnestly in the possibility of a better life, yet had no idea about where to find it. His earliest published fiction was in the form of brief, sharply satirical dialogues. The two dialogues included in the Baby in the Icebox collection, "The Hero" and "Theological Interlude," both originally appeared in the early '20s in The American Mercury, a magazine run by Cain's friend, the satirist H.L. Mencken. Cain overloads these pieces with his own impression...
After the dialogues, Cain began writing serious stories, and, as Roy Hoopes says in his introduction to the collection, his writing began to solidify. Most often the stories concern lonely and unhappy men who fall in love with lonely and unhappy women. The stories are about people with little in the world going for them, with little to look forward to and little to expect out of life, who suddenly find themselves thrown together for some unexpected reason. In "Coal Black," for example, a miner discovers a young woman who has accidentaly wandered down into the mine. To avoid getting...
There are no lengthy courtships between Cain's characters, no flowers and chocolate, no meeting her parents and asking for her father's blessing. The passions are sudden and spontaneous and violent. Yet they do not seem phony or contrived. For all these homeless unhappy characters, the prospect of being loved stirs and then awakens their passions. In "The Girl in the Storm," for example, a railroad hobo finds himself trapped inside an old store during a flood with a young girl. After protecting her from the water and keeping her warm, he for the first time feels as though...