Word: cains
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...activity is contentious and acute. To an editor: "When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split." On James M. Cain (Double Indemnity): "Every thing he writes smells like a billy goat." On Somerset Maugham: His gift "belongs to the great judge or the great diplomat ... He would have made a great Roman." On John P. Marquand: "Beautiful detailed observation and the total effect of a steel engraving with no col or at all. I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday." On Hemingway: "I suppose the weakness of writers like Hemingway...
...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...
...title story, "Dead Man," and the deceptively titled "Pastorale" also have themes dealing with murder. Frighteningly, in each case murder seems to happen naturally, as though it were somehow an acceptable outlet for violent emotions. Only after committing the act itself do the characters begin to feel remorse. Ironically, Cain never seems to care much about the victim and rarely describes a victim's character. When he does, the victim usually comes across as some slovenly, mean person who was better off dead. In each case, the notion of the perfect crime obsesses the murderer, and in each case...
...herein lies a subtle beauty in Cain's work. His characters--the bums, thieves and lowlifes--all somehow share a common thread of dignity. They share a common conception of what is just. In the end it is not the authorities who step in and solve the crime, who foil the perfect murder. Rather, it is the criminals themselves, who, tortured by their own feelings of guilt, in the end find what little solace they can by confessing their sins...