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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

James M. Cain

by Daniel P. Murphy

Other literary forms

James M. Cain began his career as a novelist relatively late in life. Cain first wrote professionally as a journalist. Long after he had become famous for his fiction, he would describe himself in Who’s Who in America as a “newspaperman.” Cain used his newspaper work as a springboard to a broader literary career in the 1920’s. As a member of the editorial staff of the New York World he commented acerbically on contemporary American culture. Cain also authored a number of short stories that never appeared in hardcover during his lifetime. Following Cain’s death, Roy Hoopes edited three collections of his journalistic writing and short fiction, The Baby in the Icebox, and Other Short Fiction (1981), Sixty Years of Journalism (1986), and Career in C Major, and Other Fiction (1986). Cain long dreamed of becoming a playwright, but success eluded him. An early effort, Crashing the Gates (pr. 1926), failed before reaching Broadway. A dramatization of The Postman Always Rings Twice (pr. 1936) ran for seventy-two performances in New York. Cain spent many years in Hollywood as a screenwriter but received screen credit for only three films, Algiers (1938), Stand Up and Fight (1939), and Gypsy Wildcat (1944).

James M. Cain.

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(AP/Wide World Photos)

Achievements

James M. Cain’s standing as a novelist has long been the subject of critical controversy. His first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, became a sensational best seller, but the work’s lurid mix of sex and violence inevitably led to doubts about Cain’s literary seriousness. In the years that followed, Cain never strayed from his twin themes of crime and sexual obsession. Critical opinion was divided among those who appreciated Cain as a poet of tabloid murder, such as writer Edmund Wilson, and those who believed that Cain exploited rather than explored the material of his books, such as the novelist James T. Farrell. After his period of greatest notoriety during the Depression and the World War II years, Cain’s work was largely ignored by critics and scholars. He never received a literary prize for his novels, though late in life he received a lifetime achievement award from the Mystery Writers of America. Cain himself tended to dismiss critical commentary on his artistry, preferring instead to quote his sales figures. Novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce endure as classic examples of the “hard-boiled” or “tough guy” school of writing that flourished in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and inspired American film noir. Along with such contemporaries as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain will be remembered as a writer who illuminated an existential terror lying just beneath the often-glittering surface of American life.

Biography

James Mallahan Cain was the eldest of two sons and three daughters born to James William Cain and Rose Mallahan Cain. His father was a professor of English and a college administrator who became the president of Washington College. His mother was a trained opera coloratura who gave up her professional ambitions to raise a family. Later in life Cain repeatedly expressed a sense of resentment and rivalry regarding his handsome and accomplished father. He revered his mother and imbibed from her an abiding love of the opera. After graduating from Washington College in 1910, Cain attempted to realize his dreams of a career in the opera by studying to be a singer. Unfortunately his voice could not match his aspiration, and he quit after a year of frustration. Between 1910 and 1914, Cain worked at a succession of jobs as he searched for a direction in life. He decided to become a writer, though he always regarded writing as a second choice because of his failure to express himself in music. He moved home and began writing short stories and sketches, none of which he could sell. Cain supported himself by teaching mathematics and English at Washington College and earned a master’s degree in drama.

Restless, Cain moved to Baltimore in 1917 and found work as a newspaper reporter. He volunteered for service in World War I and edited the Seventy-ninth Division newspaper. Upon demobilization, Cain returned to Baltimore and journalism. He embarked on a course that made him a successful man of letters in the 1920’s. He began publishing essays and stories in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and the Saturday Evening Post. He became friends with editor H. L. Mencken and contributed a series of satiric dialogues to Mencken’s The American Mercury, published in Our Government in 1930. After a brief stint teaching at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Cain moved to New York City in 1924. He joined the editorial staff of the New York World. There he wrote witty commentaries on life during the Jazz Age. When the World failed in 1931, Cain moved to The New Yorker as managing editor. He stayed at The New Yorker only nine months. Like many other writers, Cain traveled to Hollywood, taking advantage of a lucrative offer to write screenplays.

Cain never became a great success at screenwriting, and by 1933 he was out of a job. Financially pressed, he wrote his first novel that spring and summer. The Postman Always Rings Twice appeared in 1934 and was a literary sensation and popular triumph. The success of the novel revived Cain’s Hollywood career, and he made California the setting of his most powerful works. During the 1930’s, Cain produced a string of rough-edged novels that evoked some of the darkest shadows of life in Depression-era America. With the 1940’s, however, Cain’s inspiration seemed to fade, though he published for another thirty years. In 1946-1947, he attempted to establish an organization called the American Authors’ Authority, which would have protected the economic rights of writers, but the effort failed. Cain proved a poor husband to three wives, but in 1947 he married for the fourth time, successfully, to Florence Macbeth, an opera singer like his mother. In 1948, Cain returned home to Maryland, moving to Hyattsville. He lived there quietly, continuing to write until his death in 1977.

Analysis

James M. Cain’s strengths as a novelist are inextricably bound to his weaknesses. He has often been praised for the economy of his style and the speed with which he moves his narrative. Readers experience a delicious sense of surrender to the headlong impetus of his storytelling, yet motion in Cain’s work often masks wayward prose and manipulative plotting. Critics have remarked on the cinematic quality of his writing. His protagonists live in his pages with the vibrant immediacy of Hollywood icons on the big screen. Cain’s actors flirt with caricature; his characterizations are often so primitive and mechanical that they are ludicrous in retrospect.

Cain explores elemental passions in his novels. Sex, jealousy, and greed drive his characters as they thrust themselves into webs of crime and deceit. The intensity of Cain’s evocation of this raw emotionalism imbues certain of his most notorious scenes with a surreal naturalism. Frank and Cora’s frenzied lovemaking next to the body of the man they have killed in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Sharp’s rape of Juana in a church in Serenade transcend and transfigure the more mundane trappings of Cain’s stories. Moments like these also open Cain to the charge that he is trafficking in sensationalism, reveling in the sordid for its own sake. There is a voyeuristic quality to Cain’s writing. He exposes his readers to the scabrous underside of the American Dream. Although he occasionally referred to his novels as morality tales, Cain rarely provides any moral alternative to the obsessive dreams of his characters, other than the faceless brutality of authority.

In Cain’s universe the only law is chance. His protagonists enjoy no dignity with their various ends. Unlike the heroes of classical tragedy, their destinies do not illuminate the contours of a higher moral order. They are simply victims of an impersonal and blindly malevolent fate. This nihilism gives Cain’s writings much of their enduring power. He captured the desperation of people leading blighted lives in a world wracked by the Great Depression. As long as men and women continue to sense their own powerlessness in a modern, mass-produced society, Cain’s fables of reckless desire will resonate with readers.

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Cain’s first novel is generally considered his greatest. It adumbrates themes and techniques that characterize his fiction. The Postman Always Rings Twice is cast in the form of a confession written by Frank Chambers on the eve of his execution. Frank, like many of Cain’s protagonists, is doomed by his relationship with a woman. A homeless drifter, Frank wanders into a roadside “bar-b-que” and meets Cora, the frustrated wife of the Greek owner. Immediately drawn together by an overwhelming sexual chemistry, Frank and Cora kill the Greek in a fake auto accident. The murder drives the lovers apart, however, as their passion is clouded by suspicion and fear. Ironically, Cora dies in a real car crash, and Frank is then condemned for a murder he did not commit.

Cain’s grim tale proved very influential. French writer Albert Camus acknowledged The Postman Always Rings Twice as an inspiration for L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946), his own existential meditation on crime and punishment.

Double Indemnity

Double Indemnity first appeared as a magazine serial. Cain wrote it for money, and he did not regard it very highly. Over time, the novel has come to be regarded as one of Cain’s greatest achievements. Like The Postman Always Rings Twice, it is written in confessional form and tells a story of the fatal consequences of the wrong man meeting the wrong woman. Walter Huff, an insurance salesman, encounters Phyliss Nirdlinger, a beautiful, unhappily married woman. Desire and villainy blossom together as Huff sees an opportunity to win the woman he loves while at the same time beating the system he has long served. Huff and Phyliss kill Mr. Nirdlinger, making it look like an unusual accident, worth a double indemnity on his life insurance. As always in Cain, however, success in crime brings only anxiety and distrust. The lovers’ mutual doubts and jealousy culminate in a deadly meeting on a cruise ship.

Serenade

Serenade provided sensational reading in the 1930’s. It is Cain’s psychologically outlandish commentary on sex and artistry. The protagonist and narrator, John Sharp, is an opera singer who has retreated to Mexico because of the failure of his voice. Cain’s premise is that Sharp cannot sing because of his receptiveness to the sexual advances of conductor Stephen Hawes. Sharp falls under the spell of Juana, an uneducated earth mother, whose embraces restore his sexual and vocal potency. Sharp returns to California and stardom. His success is challenged when Hawes appears. Juana kills Hawes, almost ritually, during a mock bullfight. Sharp insists on fleeing with Juana and inadvertently causes her death.

Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce marked a departure for Cain: The book contains no murders; it is told in the third person; its protagonist is a woman. The novel remains true, however, to Cain’s dark vision of human relationships. Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife who rejects her philandering husband. Forced to support herself, she begins as a waitress and becomes the owner of a chain of restaurants. Mildred’s undoing is her extravagant, almost incestuous, love for her daughter Veda, an aspiring opera singer. Mildred mortgages her restaurants to finance Veda’s career. Veda responds by leaving, taking with her Mildred’s second husband. Mildred lives on, ruined and alone, her career a perverse distortion of America’s Horatio Alger myth.

The Butterfly

Cain’s originality and intensity seemed to dissipate with the end of the Depression and the advent of World War II. Some critics think highly of The Butterfly, a tale of incest and murder set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. In this novel Cain ambitiously attempts to delineate the psychology of a delusional and obsessive personality as he traces the agonies of a self-righteous mountaineer sexually drawn to a young woman he believes to be his daughter. Cain’s lofty intentions never attain fruition, however, because he allows his mountaineer and supporting characters to dissolve into vulgar and simplistic stereotypes. Flawed as it is, The Butterfly is the best of Cain’s later writing, which separates into unrealized historical romances and diffident echoes of his earlier work. Cain’s reputation as a novelist will always rest on the bitter existential melodramas he produced in the 1930’s.

Bibliography

1 

Cain, James M. “An Interview with James M. Cain.” Interview by John Carr. Armchair Detective 16, no. 1 (1973): 4-21. Cain reveals interesting highlights of his career as a reporter and explains the influence of Vincent Sergeant Lawrence, a journalist and screenwriter, on his work. Cain’s comments on his three major novels are particularly informative. Includes an annotated list of people important in Cain’s life and a bibliography of Cain’s writings.

2 

Hoopes, Roy. Cain. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. Comprehensive biography is divided into four chronological parts, covering his years in Maryland and France, New York, Hollywood, and Hyattsville. Includes an afterword on Cain as newspaperman. Supplemented by extensive source notes, a list of Cain’s publications, a filmography, and an index.

3 

Madden, David. Cain’s Craft. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. One of Cain’s earliest academic champions explores the author’s literary techniques. Compares some of Cain’s works to novels by other writers and addresses the ways in which Cain’s books have been adapted to the screen.

4 

_______. James M. Cain. New York: Twayne, 1970. Well-written introductory volume takes note of Cain’s varied reputation as an excellent, trashy, important, and always popular writer. Approaches every major aspect of his work on several levels, including his life in relation to his writing, analysis of his characters, and his technical expertise. Complemented by notes, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and an index.

5 

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Intriguing exercise in literary criticism links the hard-boiled writings of Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler to contemporary economic and technological changes. Marling sees these writers as pioneers of an aesthetic for the postindustrial age.

6 

Nyman, Jopi. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Examines the fiction of Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and Horace McCoy and asserts that the romanticism and pathos in these works reflects the authors’ nostalgia for a lost world of individualism and true manhood.

7 

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Man Under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain.” In Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Brief but wide-ranging essay approaches Cain’s novels as significant for the light they throw on his relationship with the American audience of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

8 

Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 2000. Analysis of violence in American novels includes an examination of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Concludes that in writing this “sadistic” novel, Cain created a “sardonic, unencumbered narrative style that proved more influential than the story it conveyed.”

9 

Skenazy, Paul. James M. Cain. New York: Continuum, 1989. Comprehensive study of Cain’s work. Skenazy is more critical of the author’s writing than are some other commentators (including Madden, cited above) but acknowledges Cain’s importance and his continuing capacity to attract readers.

10 

Wilson, Edmund. “The Boys in the Back Room.” In Classics and Commercials. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1950. Personal essay by an astute social and cultural commentator groups Cain with John Steinbeck, John O’Hara, William Saroyan, and others in the 1930’s and 1940’s who were influenced by Ernest Hemingway. Wilson considers Cain to be the best of these writers.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Murphy, Daniel P. "James M. Cain." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_11010140000063.
APA 7th
Murphy, D. P. (2010). James M. Cain. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Murphy, Daniel P. "James M. Cain." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.