I had a very mixed reaction to this book. I liked Cain's big three very much. This one seems very different. Perhaps it's because he was still working on it when he died. I was intrigued with the story from page one but, the main character and narrator was immensely annoying. She seemed ver...
Well done story that paints a realistic portrayal of a woman's struggle for success during the depression era.This story gives me thoughts of a previous read novel Revolutionary Road by Yates which also was adapted into big screen well. They really are both of similar tones. A decline of the fami...
”Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.” John Garfield and Lana Turner in the 1946 movie.Frank Chambers is a drifter, a man who, when life gets too heavy, catches the next boxcar out of town or puts his thumb out on the nearest highway. Being comfortable or ...
All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity.
Τρίτο βιβλίο του Τζέιμς Κέιν που διαβάζω και με διαφορά είναι το πιο αδύναμο. Το κλασικό "Ο ταχυδρόμος χτυπά πάντα δυο φορές" δεν με ξετρέλανε αλλά σίγουρα μου άρεσε και αξίζει να μνημονεύεται και το επίσης κλασικό "Διπλό άλλοθι" μου φάνηκε τρομερό, από τα καλύτερα νουάρ μυθιστορήματα που έχω δια...
I love this hard-boiled, noir stuff.This book is from late in Cain's career and is set in the era when a girl was described by her measurements ... and Mandy, age 16, thoughtfully provides these right in the first sentence.Mandy (as is sometimes the case in Cain's novels) has a mother who is even...
Love, at first real, is made subservient to power. And the people that love are consumed by the greed, and then destroyed.But this is not a drama of epic style, in the prose of James M. Cain it all grows from a trivial setup in a second-rated city somewhere in the middle of America.Ben is a drive...
Mignon is a beautiful young widow who, with her father, has come to New Orleans at the close of the Civil War in the hopes of improving their war-reduced fortunes. But the risky trade in contraband cotton has landed her father in jail and Mignon at the hotel room door of Bill Cresap. Cresap, rece...
There’s a great scene in “The Bank Dick” where W.C. Fields reads a script to a dapper actor dressed in top hat and tails. “You win the game for the football team in the last thirty seconds. You throw passes, you kick field goals, you run touchdown after touchdown”. The actor is outraged and asks ...
One of the craziest books I've ever read. So crazy it deserves a spoilery synopsis. Spoilers to follow:Johnny is a down and out American singer in Mexico. Once he was a success in Europe, but he lost his voice and now he's broke. Also he's really bigoted. It's good to be prepared for that instead...
Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.
James M. Cain had a long and distinguished literary career (died 1977), but I never got around to reading anything but The Postman Always Rings Twice. In fact, I'm not sure I ever really read it, or just knew the title and saw a movie or something. I picked up The Root of His Evil out of curiosit...
SINFUL WOMAN. (1947). James M. Cain. **1/2.Cain is mostly remembered as a writer based on his books that were turned into films, but he did publish several shorter works – typically ignored by critics because they were issued in paperback format. It’s probably better that way. This short wor...
A salesman, a would-be divorcée, and an insurance policy turn toxic in RenoVegas is a city of lovers, but in Reno, the business is divorce. Six weeks in Reno can erase the darkest marriages, and the only question is how to pass the time—craps or roulette? Jane Delavan is a roulette woman, a state...
More great (and politically incorrect) James M. Cain:(SPOILERS)Meet Graham Kirby, age 30, real estate entrepreneur and local booster. He has been successful so far in life, and clearly has a plan for continuing to be so. He has moved on from tough beginnings and is now the breadwinner in his ext...
I skulked—alone, seeing no one except people who meant nothing to me, such as parking lot attendants, gas station men, and waiters, and doing nothing but pray she would come back. I’d make my own breakfast, go down and pick up my mail, the paper, and messages, then go out as though I were going t...
Back home he had always heard them called forest fires, but they seemed to be brush fires here in California. So far, all he had got out of it was a suit of denims, a pair of shoes, and a ration of stew, served in an army mess kit. For that he had ridden twenty miles in a jolting truck out from L...
But I hung on to them both and staggered to a chair, where I sat down real quick, as I had to. I mean I was stunned and might have toppled if I tried to stay on my feet. Because, of course, I knew by now that Rick had played me a trick, sending me down to that drugstore so he could give me the ai...
There were times when we forgot everything else and were terribly close, but they were merely occasional interludes in what was beginning to feel like the unreal dreams one has in a fever. The newspapers were only incidental so far as I was concerned. What made it so terrible was Grant and the gr...
Here they hang you—it’s not no friendly gas chamber. You killed Valenty, didn’t you—you and this here wife?” “You think I did, sure enough?” “Listen, we know.” “Very idea scares me.” “She got him up on that tank—we can prove it. You followed him up—we can prove it. You made him jump at gun’s poin...
It remained there exactly as they had left it, until they thought they would go insane.The newspapers shrieked the story of Caspar’s escape from the officers. They told how he had brought them to the Columbus, on the assurance that his wealth was stored in a vault there; how he had led them to a ...
That was a little grocery on one of the streets off the highway, railroad track, and rabbit run in the middle of town. But when I had the stuff sacked, and was tiptoeing out, Buck called. There were shots, and bullets went past my head. I ran so hard that when the three of us met, in a jungle by ...
She was still in her mood of elation, though resentful of “that girl—why, the nerve of her, showing up as she did at the funeral, and after accusing Sally.” To his mouth came a hot retort, but he caught himself in time and said mildly: “Oh, well, it’s been a dreadful time for everyone, and for he...
I missed him coming to the bar each night; at least I missed his nineteen-dollar tips. Things went on I suppose for two or three weeks, into the early fall. It was the tail end of September by then, and I’d switched back from my summer hot pants to the velveteen trunks and pantyhose, which I’d ju...