If you have the courage, take a look this summer at [Cain x 3]…. Courage is needed because of an entire generation of tough-guy writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, B. Traven, Horace McCoy and others of the Southern California school—James M. Cain is possessed of the most brutal, elemental, and intrinsically pessimistic view of human events and possibilities. Only another Californian, Robinson Jeffers, working up the coast at Big Sur and in another genre, narrative poetry, matches Cain's abysmal bleakness.

Something happened in Southern California during the 1930s. Some new vision of evil rushed in upon the American consciousness….

It was a demicivilization of expatriates, and James M. Cain was part of it, brought there, like Fitzgerald and Faulkner, to write for the movies…. Yet Cain looked around himself, noted what he saw, and in 1934, after more than a decade of trying to write fiction, published The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of the finest moments of depression literature. (p. 31)

A Cain story rushes forward with the headlong pace of a writer who has left everything save narrative on the cutting room floor. Yet we put Cain down with a conviction of social density and accomplished experience; for he triggers in us an act of imaginative cooperation. Convinced that Cain's fables of lust, murder and money are true to the epistructure of life in the urban-industrial complex, the reader amplifies and visualizes the details, like a director working from the bare bones of a story line…. Hollywood transformed Cain's cinematic narratives into great movies, and the movies in turn conferred upon the Cain canon a more ample and substantial life than it would have had on its own. Reading Cain, then, is a mixed media event…. (pp. 31-2)

Cain is primarily a writer of the 1930s and the 1940s. Cain's The Magician's Wife (1965), for instance, suffers from an element of time displacement, the characters moving and acting in a psychological calculation outside of anything having to do with the 1960s, either as a matter of motivation or ambience.

But then again all of Cain's best work has an element of laconic timelessness. The depression addicted certain writers to ideology. Many of them wrote great—and talky—novels. Writers like Cain, Chandler, Hammett and McCoy went in the opposite direction. Rather than explicitly analyze the breakdown of the machinery of the polis, they funded the anxieties of the collapse into moments of pure experience: moments that existed beyond the consolations of style, thought or symbol. Here, they said, face it straight and draw your own conclusions. Cain and the others did this partly because, possessed of solid commercial instincts, they knew that unadorned sex and violence had been on the bestseller list since the Bible and the Greeks. But they did it this way also because they realized that, in rendering what was evil and tragic in human affairs, it was often better to keep your mouth shut because most of what you would be saying was not what you meant at all, not what you meant at all. They turned themselves into tough guys because that seemed the best moral and esthetic posture with which to face a time of collapse and lost meaning. (p. 32)