If Hammett, Chandler, and the Cains were baseball players

My recent posts about classic American hard-boiled fiction (click the link, then scroll down) have reverberated all the way to Finland, where that genre-jumping pulp maven Juri Nummelin raises his eyebrows at my suggestion that James M. Cain has dated worse than Hammett, Chandler, or Paul Cain.

Here's what I meant: If all four were baseball players, Hammett and Chandler would be Babe Ruth or Honus Wagner, pioneers of staggering and lasting accomplishment whose achievements arguably dwarf those of their successors. Paul Cain is Shoeless Joe Jackson, an awesome talent kept out of the Hall of Fame by a career quirk (Jackson's involvement in the Black Sox scandal; Cain's tiny, though absolutely first-rate, output).

Bur James M. Cain is something like Candy Cummings, a nineteenth-century pitcher of modest career statistics who made the Hall of Fame because he was credited with inventing the curveball. That's probably hard on Cain, but you get the idea: As important an innovator as he was in sexual frankness and portrayal of doomed characters, his successors did it better.

Acknowledging that I've read less of his work than I have of Chandler's or Hammett's, the most I can grant James M. Cain is the status of a trailblazer surpassed by later, greater achievements by others. I find The Getaway's doomed lovers on the road to hell fresher and more chilling than those in The Postman Always Rings Twice, for example.

One could argue, on the other hand, that Hammett and Chandler remain unsurpassed at the things they did best.

*

Who would your favorite crime writers be if they were athletes (or politicans, tycoons, or leaders in some field of human endeavor other than crime writing?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Bite me, you nut: A descent into James M. Cain's world

The Postman Always Rings Twice is supposed to have shocked readers upon its publication in 1934, and Raymond Chandler famously wrote:

"James Cain … is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way."

To read Postman today, with Chandler’s assessment in mind, is to be thrown back to a time when readers could be shocked by bits like:

"I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers. … `Bite me! Bite me!'”

and

“Come here, before I sock you.”

“You nut.”

Passages like that require an act of imagination on the part of readers today, lest they induce ironic or condescending smiles. Does Cain’s narrative provide the ground for that imagination to take root? Possibly. (I’ve read just a few chapters.) Maybe the trouble with Cain is not, pace Chandler, that he was too dirty but rather that he was not dirty enough.

But Chandler and Hammett require no such imaginative leap; their best work remains as immediate as it was sixty, seventy, and eighty years ago. Same with the scant published work of the great Paul Cain. Why is this?

Though his name is often linked with Chandler’s, James M. Cain did not write for the pulps. Instead, he was a journalist and then a screenwriter, and, though I'm not up on my American magazines, it looks to me as if his short stories appeared not in pulp magazines like Black Mask, but rather in the slicks. Lacking a background in the pulps, did he have literary ambitions different from Hammett's, Chandlers's, or Paul Cain's? Could such a difference account for the occasional datedness of his prose?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012