James M. Cain
1892–1977 · American novelist, journalist and screenwriter
James M. Cain (Annapolis, Maryland, 1892 - University Park, Maryland, 1977) was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely considered one of the founders of the hardboiled school of crime fiction, alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing mainly in the 1930s and 1940s, he shifted the focus of crime stories away from the detective and toward the killers themselves.
Cain was raised in an Irish-American Catholic family. His mother, a trained opera singer, passed on her love of music, though she discouraged him from becoming a singer himself. After studying at Washington College, he drifted through a series of jobs, including clerk, surveyor and insurance salesman, before turning to journalism at The Baltimore Sun and The American Mercury. During the First World War he served in France, writing for an army publication.
In 1932 he signed with Paramount as a screenwriter, but the work frustrated him. Studios rewrote his material, and over fifteen years he managed to get only three of his projects made. Close to forty, he published The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), a bestseller inspired by the Snyder-Gray case. Later novels such as Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce followed, with characters undone by destructive passions.
His spare, direct prose drew partly on the colloquial speech he had heard as a boy. Cain never matched the success of his early years, though he kept writing into old age, and several of his books appeared after his death. His legacy lives on most visibly in film: around thirty movies are based on his work. In 2012, the unpublished novel The Cocktail Waitress appeared, after its editor spent nine years tracking down the manuscript.
Key works
- The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934): a novel about a drifter and a restaurant owner's wife who plot to kill her husband, notable for making the killers its protagonists.
- Double Indemnity (1936): a tale of an insurance fraud that turns into a deadly trap.
- Serenade (1937): a novel in which music and opera play a central role.
- Mildred Pierce (1941): the story of a mother who builds a business empire and faces family conflict.
Curiosities
A real case behind the novel
The Postman Always Rings Twice was inspired by the Snyder-Gray murder case of the late 1920s. It is often cited as the first hardboiled novel told from the killers' point of view rather than a detective's.
A blunt verdict
When Cain told his mother he wanted to become a professional opera singer, she, a trained soprano herself, bluntly dismissed the idea. He abandoned the plan and turned to writing.
A recovered novel
The manuscript of The Cocktail Waitress, written shortly before his death, was published in 2012. His editor, Charles Ardai, spent nine years tracking it down.
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