Word: icebox
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...Edna will have to leave. Edna realizes that this news will send Wes back to booze and her away from him: "Wes got up and pulled the drapes and the ocean was gone just like that. I went in to start supper. We still had some fish in the icebox. There wasn't much else. We'll clean it up tonight, I thought, and that will...
...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 to the father of a minor literary movement in California...
...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 of lower middle class dialect. His satire of the characters is not balanced...
Several of the stories in The Baby in the Icebox, like the 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...
...assemblage of what appears to be every vegetable in England. The gargantuan Edwardian meals that she prepares are photographed with almost sinful clarity (six of the episodes required the services of a cookery adviser). What Upstairs, Downstairs did for class consciousness, The Duchess of Duke Street may do for icebox raiding...