The Butterfly (1946)

By what I can glean from James M. Cain's 1946 preface, The Butterfly originated many years earlier as a story of a mostly indigent family from the Big Sandy River country of Appalachia who heads out for a better life in California. Cain abandoned it when he caught wind of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and subsequently ransacked the manuscript for scenes and passages of other novels. But it's not at all like Steinbeck's novel, not least because the central animating plot point is a complicated story of adultery and incest, and not much of anything to do with the noble dignity of poverty. It trucks in broad stereotypes, often cutting over to the lurid chiefly because it can, and thus the only interest it holds is in wondering how far it will go. It's a rush job potboiler in its final, brief form (barely 100 pages), with a lot of complications intended to demarcate the innocent and corrupt in programmatic fashion, which results in everyone being corrupt, though not necessarily by the terms of the story, which is just annoying. All the never-ending mysteries set up here could be resolved credibly, quickly, and without drama by a few judicious DNA tests. I was frankly shocked by the snide way Cain unfailingly assumes his own superiority to the rubes and hayseeds he condescends to put through predictable paces. Corn liquor in fruit jars, grotesque ignorance, depraved behavior, and pride. Guns, humiliations. He probably has many details about the lives of his characters right—as he firmly asserts in the preface. But he clearly never quite sees them as human. One wonders what might have happened if he'd never heard of the Steinbeck book and finished. It's possible there's a good story in this group of characters, though less easy to see how it works as a James M. Cain novel. He seems most effective to me with more money around the place—in insurance companies, opera, suburban Southern California. The Postman Always Rings Twice shows that he could write about poverty convincingly. But he'd have had to get a lot more delicate in The Butterfly a lot quicker, in areas such as incest, and he'd have had to find ways to make it more believable. Two tall orders there.

In case it's not at the library.

Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)

I don't think you can count this as one of the best by James M. Cain, which makes me wonder how precipitously the quality falls off after his three best-known novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce). Even this one got made into a movie too (Slightly Scarlet, 1956) so conceivably it is still better than many others. It frequently put me in mind of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest. Both are focused on changes of corrupting power in mid-sized or small cities, engineered by one or two clever enterprising fellows (and dames), the chief enterpriser also doing the first-person narrative honors. So we see and hear from such principals as the mayor, district attorney, chief of police, and boss crime lord. Excuse me for yawning. I don't see many productive directions for fiction about political corruption to go, All the King's Men notwithstanding. If it turns out the bad guys win it's cynical and also not a surprise; if the good guys take it it's not believable. Better all around to go the factual route, because the old cliché holds true: you can't make up the best stuff. Given that it is Cain in 1942, there's a certain amount of quality here in spite of everything (including that I would be surprised if he looked at this manuscript more than twice, and not at all surprised if it were only once). Dialogue and exposition are clipped and propulsive, also lots of people are strangely familiar with opera. There's a love story at the center but Cain is unable for once to make it sick enough to be interesting, so it tends to just lay there and quiver any time it's rotated up front. There's lots of action, lots of narrative sequence, but not much in the way of stakes, just low-level hoodlum types getting over on their higher-level superiors, extending all the way up to the mayor's office—two mayor's offices, actually, because of course there's also an obvious element of irony here about the everlasting fungibility of political corruption. There are biographies and history books packed full of stories much better than this. For better or worse, however, few will tell them as well as Cain does, so you can take that into account too.

In case it's not at the library.

Serenade (1937)

James M. Cain's Serenade was written right after The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and it definitely has a lot of their brisk, hard-boiled forward momentum. And despite its many strange elements it is still, more than anything, a crime novel in a decided noir style, recognizably Cain. Yet it is ultimately served well by the strange elements: an Aztec-Mexican prostitute, a shrewd and talented American opera singer, and various lurid mid-century details of drunkenness and debauchery, notably a crazed power-mad homosexual stereotype who arrives late. At which point it heads off directly into the macabre and the caricatured with just about enough unholy zeal to get it across the finish line. Until then, and after a brief prologue in a purple Mexico, it tends to be most interesting when it is about the career of the opera singer, John Sharp, who is on the comeback trail. Sharp talks and behaves more like an automaton, as he wheels and deals with figures of great power in the entertainment / culture industries of the '30s in Hollywood and New York, which is frankly weird. But if the tone is slightly jarring, the details are always interesting, based on Cain's own keen appreciation for the world of opera. The whole thing is way overheated from start to finish, larded up with arguably too many caricatures. But I thought it was remarkably sensitive to Juana, the Aztec-Mexican prostitute, who plays hard against expectations and has a lot of complexity behind her accent, frequently observing that things seem "fonny." Serenade goes over the top at its climax, in a scene that very much surprised me, and clarified the love relationship between the principals. I guess it might suffer overall in some of its extremes when you reflect on it, but the inflamed language and incident pretty much had me all the way. I also liked and was surprised by some of the ways Cain treats homosexuality here, though of course it had to be explicitly licensed by the theatrical opera settings. In the '30s, evidently, everyone understands that's where you find "them," and "they" are all here: transvestites, lesbians, and gays, oh my. But behind that a remarkable clarity sometimes peers out, which I like about Serenade quite a bit. "There's nothing to tell," Sharp says when he is finally confessing his gay affair of years earlier to Juana. "Every man has got five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out, and I did, that's all."

In case it's not at the library.

Mildred Pierce (1941)

You could fit both of James Cain's first two novels inside of this one, and still have room left over for a good chunk of his third. It's a funny thing when a writer's work starts feeling expansive when a novel comes in at 300 pages, but that's the thing about Cain. With the preternatural compression and determined hard-nosed flint of those first two, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain went to supernatural lengths to remove the inessential. He's still pretty hardcore hard-boiled here in his fourth, but as the title alone would seem to indicate, this is more a self-conscious attempt at a "woman's story"—sardonic parody, straight-up melodrama, or otherwise—and so even though there's enough mayhem and cruelty to satisfy any aficionado of crime fiction, there are shades and nuance of emotion and a parade of sticky relationships as well. Those things require time and space to develop, hence the comparative War and Peace scope. I was familiar first with the classic Joan Crawford vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz. But I see now that typically enough a lot of blunting and elision was required to get the story whittled down to a two-hour feature (unlike the productions based on Cain's first two, which are practically straight lifts). (I am looking forward, let me add quickly, to the Mildred Pierce mini-series scheduled to arrive late next month on HBO, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet, which I think from its scope has a better chance of successfully hewing closer to the novel.) I was surprised at Cain's ability here to strike a relaxed tone and let events unspool more deliberately, as the complications ripen naturally. The Crawford movie is starkly black and white in more ways than one; I recall the central relationship between Mildred Pierce and her daughter as fairly clearly defined. One is bad and one is not. While much of that dynamic comes from the novel, the situation in toto is infinitely more complex, even starting with its surprising grasp of the difficulties confronting women who need to earn a living and want to be successful about it, particularly in those times. Cain's voice here reminds me more of hale and hearty American bonhomie, more Sinclair Lewis than Dashiell Hammett—though, to be sure, Cain as always remains an original. The shift in tone suits the material better, setting up the gut punches more effectively rather than telegraphing and continually attempting to top them. In his first two novels Cain delivers a gnawing sense of doom from the first sentences forward. Here, he dresses up that sense of doom inside pretty wrapping paper of ordinary American lives, simple hopes, and the bravado of cheer. Open the package, it's still pretty dark in there.

In case it's not at the library.

Double Indemnity (1936)

The second novel by James M. Cain is almost as slender as the first, but if anything it's even more propulsive about hitting its plot points and moving along. That's something I chalk up to the fact that it was published originally in serialized form. It's absolutely terrific stuff, one of the most essential mystery novels of all, not just of the noir subgenre where it might be the single one best. It's likely familiar to many as Billy Wilder's 1944 film adaptation with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, the screenplay for which Wilder collaborated on with Raymond Chandler. Cain's background as a screenplay writer in his own right made his fiction uniquely adaptable to movies, and perhaps nowhere is it so evident as here—I rank this movie pretty high too, making it one of those unique and happy occurrences that should be enjoyed when they happen: great novel, great movie. The story is pretty simple. Insurance man Walter Huff throws in with femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger (perhaps the most unlikely name ever for a femme fatale) on an elaborate plot to off her husband for insurance money; for him it's about the dame as much as the money. For her, it's not as clear. It's set again in southern California, and if the movie can boast the talents of the amazing Stanwyck (and, yes, MacMurray is pretty good too), the book has the advantage of color, by which I mean the language itself as much as anything. You can open this to practically any page and get prose as dense and compact as heavy metals, or sparkling dialogue, or both. It's purely a treat and even more worth savoring than Cain's first. Here's an obligatory sample, offered partly as a taste for you of what the book has in store, and yet perhaps even more as an opportunity for me to type this language and enjoy the fleeting sensation of having actually written it: "The furniture was Spanish, the kind that looks pretty and sits stiff. The rug was one of those 12 x 15's that would have been Mexican except it was made in Oakland, California. The blood-red drapes were there, but they didn't mean anything. All these Spanish houses have red velvet drapes that run on iron spears, and generally some red velvet wall tapestries to go with them. This was right out of the same can, with a coat-of-arms tapestry over the fireplace and a castle tapestry over the fireplace." Thanks, that felt good.

In case it's not at the library.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

Newspaperman James M. Cain's first novel is so radically boiled down to the fundamentals, practically inventing the most characteristic aspects of the noir sub-genre as it goes, that it's little more than a long story, easily finished in one sitting—which is usually how it goes, especially on first encounter, because the actions and motivations come at you like pepper spray, swift, stark, and compelling. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon," it starts. Last chance to catch a breath. Maybe you've seen the movies. I actually haven't seen any of them yet. The plot is a classic love triangle, set in down-at-the-heels California Okie territory and related by drifter Frank Chambers, who wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern shortly after noted exit from hay truck. The tavern is run by an older Greek fellow named Nick Papadakis and his young wife, the luscious Cora. It's not too long before Frank has jumped Cora, who until then has found only disappointment in her sojourn from Iowa to the Golden State, netting her only a position as short-order cook in a roadside joint and a husband almost twice her age. And it's not too long after that that Frank and Cora are plotting Nick's murder, nor after that when they rapidly begin losing trust in one another. Even if this is the origin point for many noir conventions, there are few surprises now in the basic paces though which Cain puts his characters, or even so much in any of the characters themselves. Instead, as Albert Camus must have picked up on himself, citing this as a primary inspiration for The Stranger, there is something eternally fascinating about trying to suss out the various shades of motivations for these uniformly desperate characters as Cain moves them deliberately about his chessboard. The sexuality is potent, even explosive. Papadakis never gets short shrift as the chump fifth wheel, but rather brings the pathos by the pailful. And the scenery is breathtaking, the inky black shadows of California after dark, the greasy stink of kitchens, the musk of unmade beds. Before you know it, it's over—but worth going through slowly one more time to savor how much Cain has packed in here, so efficiently and yet in such briskly headlong fashion that the desperation is palpable and never more than an inch away from the action.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)