There is nothing in ["The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction"] that will enhance Cain's reputation or seduce new readers….

[The editor] tells us that one of Cain's themes is the doom of joint guilt: When two people engage in an evil act, they cannot share their terrible secret and live on the same earth—they turn on each other. But to me, the theme that purrs in the engine of Cain's best work … is the proposition that love is dangerous. For Cain, when the lower regions start to percolate, there is sure to be a burnout in the brain. Cain is not a man for meaningful relationships and marriage contracts; for him the libido levels logic every time….

The pieces in the first part of this collection smack of cracker-barrel cuteness and mawkishness. Cain himself claimed that many of them were conscious imitations of Ring Lardner. But fidelity to regional language is not enough, without the writer's adding bottom, as did Twain and Faulkner. Without that substance Cain becomes indistinguishable from Titus Moody of Pepperidge Farm.

In this collection, the short stories and the magazine serial, "The Embezzler," are interesting for the formative wisps we find in them of Cain's later themes and style. When he moves to California from the East, we hear the stirrings of the later polished Cain voice, and we can see Cain's facility for delivering more information in one good paragraph than most writers do in a chapter. Amazingly, these beautiful paragraphs are never cluttered….

In "The Embezzler" there is some pure Cain, even though the polished Cain would have dismissed the ending as drivel….

The most interesting thread running through many of these stories is Cain's obsession with hobos and drifters. This might not have led to the dazzling heights of "Postman" if Cain had remained on the East Coast; but in the California of the 30's and 40's, Frank Chambers and Cora, the Des Moines beauty-contest winner, could be viewed as integral parts of a landscape that used to beckon emotional drifters (and, for that matter, still does). Cain realized that California was the only place in America where one could jettison personal history without being questioned, since nearly everyone else was in on the same scam….

This collection does offer some nuggets: early clues to style and substance, dialogue that breaks off in the teeth and descriptions as snappy as the brim of a fedora. But there is not enough.