James M. Cain was a caustic writer of newspaper editorials who published his first novel at 42 and his 18th at 84. His short, squalid thrillers made him as famous as Hemingway in the '30s; often more purple than noir, they creaked with ludicrous plot contrivances and panting dialogue, but how the pages crackled! From the first sentence, pitching the reader headlong behind the headlines of tabloid murders, to the last irony, which sounded a note more in keeping with Puritan tribunals than the requisites of hard-boiled realism, Cain drummed his trashy American fairy tales with relentless drive. By 1950, however, his tempo enfeebled partly by his own literary ambition, his audience headed for sleazier pastures. His once enthusiastic critics were silent, his later books ignored. Cain receded into the past, a relic of the Depression frequently bracketed with contemporaries in the hard-boiled schools (detective and proletariat divisions), and his lingering admirers resorted to indirection in praising him—hoisting the flags of existentialism and sociology….

Yet a few of Cain's novels have been successfully reprinted every decade or so, and the biggest groundswell in 30 years has slowly taken shape in the years since his death in 1977….

What's more, there is Cain's much touted rediscovery by Hollywood, where he labored for years as a scriptwriter and consultant, though not on the adaptations of his own books….

It can't be merely Cain's rotgut lubricity that keeps his reputation bobbing along the surface….

If Cain was a tough-guy writer, he was also the first American novelist to explore bisexuality (Serenade) and incest (The Butterfly), while asserting the connection between motiveless violence and sentimentality (Postman) and acknowledging a confused religiosity that, especially in his later works, assumes a born-again arrogance. Unlike Hammett and Chandler, Cain did not dispatch saints to patrol our mean streets, nor did he posit a balance sheet of good and evil. He was mesmerized by evil; it animates his most luminous images—Frank making the blood spurt from Cora's lips, Kady daring her father to lick the milk off her lips. His theme was the ugliness underlying American dreams, which he found more arbitrary and consequently more terrifying than Ragged Dick's desire for riches, or Jay Gatsby's for social standing. Cain saw the American dream as a childish demand for gratification at any cost, accompanied by a haunted desire for moral retribution. Cain is often considered a chronicler of California's lower depths, but he documented those dreams in all the classes of a class-bound society, from the poverty of Appalachia (Butterfly) and Mexico (Serenade), to the lower (Postman), middle (Mildred), and upper (Double Indemnity) classes of California, to the filthy rich in New York (Career in C Major). In each instance, a wish is granted, a futile delusion realized, and, in Dr. Johnson's words, "fate wings with every wish the afflicted dart."

Cain handled the variety of human wishes in tragedies and comedies—terms loosely used here, for convenience. In the tragedies, the protagonists scribble their confessions in the final moments before certain death; hell is a yawning pit waiting to engulf them and there's no possibility of escape…. In the comedies, which might be subdivided as dark (Mildred Pierce, Galatea) and light (Career in C Major, Sinful Woman, Rainbow's End), the protagonists are ultimately forgiven their sins and permitted to survive and perhaps prosper. Cain thought himself a funny man, and even his most doom-laden stories have sly moments that border on comic madness; yet his comedies, though often amusing, are invariably undermined by mawkish, disingenuous conclusions. Perhaps Cain couldn't bring himself to believe that there really was a way out.

In his most celebrated triumph, The Postman Always Rings Twice, the Cain mannerisms are sharpened to a steely glint….

Time is of the essence in Cain's first-person narratives, particularly when the protagonist faces death. Non-Freudians all, these characters have no desire to explain or justify themselves, only to tell how they got trapped. Plot is fate, and Cain will not have his victims worrying about motivation at the expense of terse, honest, unemotional accounts that carry the warning: here but for fortune, reader, goes you. (p. 34)

Perhaps what's most terrifying about Cain's outcasts is their self-righteous certainty. Cainland is out of whack with any objective moral system, but it isn't sad—it's bleak and absurd, but not forlorn. Sometimes it's almost slapstick funny.

Career in C Major (1940) is an underrated comical variation on the opera world glimpsed in Serenade, in which singing is the sword in a wittily sadistic duel of the sexes, and is used to wound instead of kill…. Singing also plays a major part in Mildred Pierce, which Cain narrated from a woman's point of view. But though there are brilliant bits, the novel is a rather one-sided chess game in which the diabolical daughter, Veda, finds countless ways to make Mildred's life unbearable, until Cain brings it to an arbitrary, exhausted close by sending her out of town….

In 1942, Cain published his dreadful gangster saga, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, a book that yellows and crinkles in the very presence of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest…. After a three-year silence, he produced a clever historical novel, Past All Dishonor, that made use of Virginia mining areas he knew from his boyhood.

Its successor, The Butterfly, recaptured the tremor and pace of Cain's early work and gave a new wrinkle to his Oedipal obsession. The maddeningly unpredictable mountain girl, Kady Tyler, who is salacious, innocent, loyal, or murderous from one page to the next, is bent on seducing her father…. The Butterfly is more poignant than its predecessors in that Jess resents his fate; his meticulous account (he's killed mid-sentence) is as much a justification as a confession. He knows he's in hell, but can't quite comprehend the events that brought him so low.

The Butterfly was Cain's last success, though five other novels quickly followed, including the three Avons, each of which was worked up from an earlier idea. Sinful Woman, a play he couldn't get produced, was altered into a funny poke at Hollywood…. Unfortunately, Cain undermines his own mischief with a cynical finish dumber than any B-movie he may have thought he was satirizing….

Galatea (1953) is Cain's strangest story, an all but incomprehensible variation on Postman, in which the sentimental flashes of religion experienced by Frank and Cora assume righteous, protective fervor. (p. 35)

Cain was 61 when he wrote Galatea, and nine years passed before he brought out the historical drama, Mignon (1962), followed by The Magician's Wife (1965). Then, after another decade, he found the energy for two final testaments, Rainbow's End (1975) and The Institute (1976), of which the former is most characteristic. Like his early work, it was fueled by newspaper headlines, the D. B. Cooper skyjacking, but as a backdrop for another joust with unrequited incest. The skyjacker falls dead into the front yard of a Li'l Abner type who is forever kicking Mammy Yokum out of his bed. At long last, Cain wrote an authentic dirty-old-man novel, in which sorry attempts at humor are grounded in constant references to round fannies and heaving cleavage, but the moral purview of Galatea is extended: the money is a jinx on them that stole it, and a blessing from heaven for the goodhearted hero, his mom, and his Daisy Mae.

In chronicling an arc that begins in the blank acceptance of Depression hopelessness and ends with the kind of moral imperviousness that made Vietnam possible, Cain may be said to have kept a close watch on the pulse of America's steadily increasing conviction that God is on her side. But it didn't help his art. In Galatea and Rainbow's End, dreams come true and everyone lives happily after. Cain became an old optimist, flabby though still leering, willing to sacrifice the metallic glint that made his early work austere and vital. He said his favorite stories were Cinderella and Pandora, wicked analogies for an age that woke up from an opulent ball to discover broken pumpkin shells and mice. At his best, he applied those fearful stories to probe more than most of his contemporaries the dirty little secrets dreamed by a desperate America and he prepared them with tabloid gusto and pitiless irony. The Augustinian confessions enhanced his rhythmic velocity, and the avenging twists of fate tightened the grip of his web, but they are not the source of Cain's immediacy, nor do they suggest the nature of his originality…. Rather it's the blank menace in his tone, the naked vitality of his craftsmanship, the unblinking willingness to follow his scamps and lowlifes to a predestined edge that keeps him shuddery and compelling. The dirty little secrets haven't changed that much, the dreams are still terrifying. Even trash has its own dominion, where greasy Prousts are valued, and in that realm, no one squats more imposingly than James M. Cain. (pp. 35, 104)