James M. Cain Mystery & Detective Fiction Analysis
Despite midcareer pretensions to high literature, James M. Cain wrote, admittedly, for two reasons: for money and because he was a writer. He had no lasting illusions about great literary art and had only contempt for critics who sought intellectual constructs in works of literature and who, for their own convenience, lumped writers into schools. Cain opposed and resisted the notion of the tough-guy school, and yet he developed a first-person style of narration that, in its cynical and incisive presentation of facts, merits the appellation “tough” or “hard-boiled.” Critic David Madden calls him “the twenty-minute egg of the hard-boiled writers.”
This style proved profitable, and Cain, in his own hard-boiled way, believed that “good work is usually profitable and bad work is not.” In the case of his fiction, this proved to be true. His work was profitable and remained in print during and after his lifetime. Good or bad, fiction is what Cain wanted most to write; he is quoted in an interview as saying, “You hire out to do other kinds of writing that leaves you more and more frustrated, until one day you burst out, say to hell with it all and go sit down somewhere and write the thing you truly want to write.”
Yet it seems that it was not the mystery story in which Cain was most interested, despite his recognition in this genre by the Mystery Writers of America (which gave him its Grand Masters Award in 1970), but something like the novelistic equivalent of Greek tragedy. His frustration at his failure in dramaturgy was profound; it makes sense that his novels, like classical Greek tragic drama, demonstrate the essential unhappiness of life, the devastation borne by the hubris manifest in the lust and greed that lead to murder, and the human desires that predispose people to incest, homosexuality, or pedophilia. Cain’s fictional personae are always minimal, as they are in Greek tragedy, and his descriptions of his characters are as spare in detail as a delineative tragic mask.
“Pastorale”
“Pastorale,” Cain’s first published short story, contains the standard constituents of almost all of his fiction: a selfishly determined goal, excessive and ill-considered actions in pursuit of that goal, and the inability of the pursuer to abide the self into which the successful actions have transformed the pursuer. A yokel narrator relates that Burbie and Lida, who want to be together, plot to kill Lida’s husband, a man much older than she. Burbie enlists Hutch, a vicious opportunist, with the false bait of a money cache. Burbie, lusting after Lida, and Hutch, greedy for money, kill the old man.
Hutch, who learns that the money cache was a mere twenty-three dollars but not that it had been scraped together by Burbie and Lida, decapitates the corpse, intending to make a gift of the head to Lida. The intent is frustrated when Hutch drowns, and after Hutch’s body and the husband’s remains are discovered, it is assumed that Hutch was the sole killer. Burbie, although free to possess Lida, confesses everything and awaits hanging as the story ends. The story is abetted by Cain’s standard elements of sex and violence.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
In 1934, Cain published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice , which proved to be his masterpiece. In the story, a man and a woman, consumed by lust for each other and by monetary greed, successfully conspire to kill the woman’s husband, again a man older than she but with a going business that will ensure the solvency of the conspirators. The incapacity of the principals...
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to accommodate themselves to the fulfillment of their dream leads to the death of the woman and, as the novel closes, the imminent execution of the man.
The opening line of The Postman Always Rings Twice (“They threw me off the hay truck about noon”) came to be acclaimed as a striking example of the concise, attention-getting narrative hook. Cain’s use of “they” is existentialist in its positing of the Other against the Individual. Jean-Paul Sartre’s story “Le Mur” (“The Wall”) begins in the same way: “They threw us into a big, white room. . . . ” The last chapter of The Postman Always Rings Twice, like its first paragraph, makes much use of the pronoun “they,” culminating with “Here they come,” in reference to those who will take the narrator to his execution. This classical balance of beginning and ending in the same context is characteristic of Cain’s work.
Double Indemnity
Double Indemnity, Cain’s masterly companion to The Postman Always Rings Twice, appeared first in serial installments during 1936 and was published again, in 1943, along with “Career in C Major” and “The Embezzler.” Double Indemnity presents a typical Cain plot: A man and a woman conspire to murder the woman’s husband so that they can satisfy their lust for each other and profit from the husband’s insurance. Their success is a prelude to their suicide pact.
Cain’s literary reputation rests chiefly on these two works. Ross Macdonald called them “a pair of native American masterpieces, back to back.” Cain looked on both works as romantic love stories rather than murder mysteries; nevertheless, they belong more to the category of the thriller than to any other. In their brevity, their classical balance, and their exposition of the essential unhappiness of human existence, they evince tragedy. Cain did not see himself as a tragedian; he insisted that he “had never theorized much about tragedy, Greek or otherwise” and yet at the same time admitted that tragedy as a “force of circumstances driving the protagonist to the commission of a dreadful act” (his father’s definition) applied to most of his writings, “even my lighter things.”
Serenade
The two novels that followed the back-to-back masterpieces were longer works, marked by the readability, but not the golden conciseness, of their predecessors. Serenade (1937) is the story of a singer whose homosexuality has resulted in the loss of his singing voice, which is restored through his consummated love for a Mexican prostitute. The triangle in this novel is once more a woman and two men, the difference being that the woman kills the man’s homosexual lover. The man joins his beloved in her flight from the law until she is discovered and killed. The discovery owes to the man’s betrayal of their identities by failing to suppress his distinctive singing voice at a critical time. Cain’s knowledge of music underscores Serenade, just as it gives form to “Career in C Major” and Mildred Pierce (1941).
Mildred Pierce
Mildred Pierce is the story of a coloratura soprano’s amorality as much as it is the story of the titular character and her sublimated incestuous desire for the soprano who is her daughter. There is sex and violence in the novel but no murder, no mystery, and no suspense. The novel opens and closes with Mildred Pierce married to a steady yet unsuccessful man who needs to be mothered. Mildred does not mother him, and the two are divorced, the man finding his mother figure in a heavy-breasted woman and Mildred disguising her desire for her daughter as maternal solicitude. Mildred achieves wealth and success as a restaurateur, and her daughter wins renown as a singer. Mildred’s world collapses as her daughter, incapable of affection and wickedly selfish, betrays and abandons her. Mildred, reconciled with her husband, whose mother figure has returned to her husband, finally finds solace in mothering him.
Love’s Lovely Counterfeit
Mildred Pierce is written in the third person, a style of narration that is not typical of Cain, who employed it in only a few of his many novels. It was followed by another third-person novel, Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942), a gangster-thriller and a patent tough-guy novel, peopled with hoods (with names such as Lefty, Bugs, and Goose), corrupt police, and crime lords. The novel displays Cain’s storytelling at its best and is perhaps his most underrated work.
Past All Dishonor and Mignon
Always conscientious about research for his novels, Cain, in his bid to become a serious writer, tended in novels such as Past All Dishonor (1946) and Mignon (1962) to subordinate his swift mode of narration to masses of researched details. Both of these novels are set in the 1860’s, both are embellished with a wealth of technical details that are historically accurate, and both have a hard-boiled narrator who, with a basic nobility that gets warped by lust and greed, is hardly distinguishable from his twentieth century counterparts in Cain’s other fiction. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Past All Dishonor ends with the narrator’s saying “Here they come” as the nemeses for his crimes close in on him. Like Mignon, in which the narrator’s loss of his beloved will be lamented with “there was my love, my life, my beautiful little Mignon, shooting by in the muddy water,” Past All Dishonor has the narrator bemoan his loss with “my wife, my love, my life, was sinking in the snow.”
There is a discernible sameness to Cain’s fiction. He tends to make his leading male characters handsome blue-eyed blonds, he makes grammatically correct but excessive use of the word “presently,” his first-person narrators all sound alike, and his inclination is manifestly toward the unhappy ending (although several of his novels end happily). One upbeat novel is The Moth (1948), in which the leading male character loves a twelve-year-old girl. Again, almost all Cain’s fiction, with the prominent exception of Mildred Pierce, is a variation on his first two works of fiction.
Sinful Woman and Jealous Woman
The two novels by Cain that indisputably can be called murder mysteries are Sinful Woman (1947) and Jealous Woman (1950). Both novels focus on the solving of a murder, both have happy endings, and both are rated among Cain’s worst performances. Cain himself wrote them off as bad jobs. Sinful Woman, like Mildred Pierce, Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, and another, The Magician’s Wife (1965), is written in third-person narration, which Cain comes close to mastering only in Love’s Lovely Counterfeit.
The Butterfly
The Butterfly (1947), a story of a man with an incestuous bent for a young woman whom he mistakenly assumes to be his daughter, is perhaps the last of Cain’s best work; it includes the now-famous preface in which he disavows any literary debt to Hemingway while affirming his admiration of Hemingway’s work. Most of Cain’s post-1947 novels were critical and commercial disappointments. In addition to those already mentioned, these include The Root of His Evil (1951, first written in 1938), Galatea (1953), The Rainbow’s End (1975), and The Institute (1976)—none of which is prime Cain, although Galatea and The Rainbow’s End flash with his narrative brilliance.
Cloud Nine
Cloud Nine, written by Cain when he was seventy-five, was edited by his biographer, Roy Hoopes, and published posthumously in 1984. It contains the usual sex and violence, including rape and murder. Its narrator, however, is, not antiheroic but a highly principled thirty-year-old man only mildly touched by greed who marries a sexy and very intelligent sixteen-year-old girl. His half brother is an evil degenerate whose villainy is unrelieved by any modicum of goodness. The narrator’s dream comes true, and the story has a happy ending. The septuagenarian Cain was more than temporally remote from the hard-boiled Cain of the 1930’s, who would have made the villain the narrator and given the story a tragic cast.
