Word: caines
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...California that Cain funy explored this theme. In California, he found a society so new, so unstable that he didn't need floods or coal mines to bring two people passionately together. As he told Hoopes, "Any piece of California, no matter how drab, prosaic, or dull, is California just the same, the land of Golden Promise." Unlike the staid, conservative East, where the wealthy stayed wealthy and the poor stayed poor, the West had become a land of overnight wealth, of rags to riches, with nobody excluded from the chase. Many characters are willing to risk anything to find...
...seems horrible, yet not really surprising when, in Cain's classic Postman, a shiftless drifter named Frank Chambers takes a job with the owner's wife, and with her plots to kill him. Nor is it surprising in Double Indemnity, when Walter Huff, an unsuccessful insurance agent, falls in love with one of his clients' wives, and plots with her to kill her husband...