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 “Dressed like this?”Fields scrutinizes the actor’s elegant suit closely and says, “We’ll give you a helmet”.“Past All Dishonor” is a lot like that, so convoluted Uncle Bill may have written it himself. Here’s the plot summary, and please don’t leave in the middle of it: Towards the end of the Civil War, a Confederate spy is sent to Northern California (!) and jumps a riverboat where he befriends a prostitute. She blows him off and he follows her to Virginia City, where she’s plying her trade. She tells him she won’t have sex with him for less than $1000, so he hits the gambling tables. He wins at roulette wheel, he wins at cards, but then he gets jumped in an alley and loses it all.He befriends a few Mexicans (!) and they get him a job working in a coal mine. Then he becomes a union (as in labor, not the Northern guys) organizer, but after a mine disaster hustles himself a gig as the crew foreman, so his union leader status is taken away from him. Anyway, he plows through more jobs than an employment agency in the next 15 pages, i.e. barroom bouncer, Union soldier, train robber, etc. And then the prostitute confesses she's a virgin at the end of the book (WTF?).James M. Cain writes in a Scholastic Books style so the prose couldn’t be written any simpler or plainer, which only ramps up the ridiculousness of the story. I also remember Cain doing the boring mine shaft tutorial in “The Butterfly” and it worked a little bit better there, too. You know the movie called “3000 Miles From Graceland”? Well, “Past All Dishonor” is 3000 miles from “Double Indemnity”.
