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

Hard-boiled at the beach

I'm bursting with enthusiasm for my adopted country, for its misfits, its losers, its hard cases, and its beaches.

I've continued my project, announced here, of reading classic American hard-boiled and noir, and I'll likely continue to do so over the next few days at an undisclosed location on the Atlantic coast. And that means blogging may be light here at Detectives Beyond Borders until next week, lest I get sun screen and beach sand all over my keyboard. In the meantime, a few notes:

1) I like Jim Thompson's The Getaway better than Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. Each is saturated with sympathy for its characters, each occasionally lapses into speechifying, but Thompson, perhaps more in this novel than in his others, has considerable fun on the way to his hellish destination.

2) Why isn't Dan J. Marlowe better known? He did his best writing in the know-it-all, smirk-at-everything, over-the-top 1960s, yet his heist novels avoid both nostalgia and jokiness. And The Vengeance Man combines Ross Thomas' eye for political shenanigans with Jim Thompson's fatalism.

Happily, readers will soon be able to learn more about Marlowe and his interesting life (He was a professional gambler, a Rotarian, a Republican city councilman, and a friend of a notorious bank robber.) Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe is scheduled for publication this fall. In the meantime, here's an appreciation of Marlowe from the biography's author, Charles Kelly.

3) Why is Paul Cain's Fast One not included in the Library of America's American Noir of the 1930s and 40s collection? It's the best, toughest, hardest-hitting American crime novel whose author is not named Chandler or Hammett. I'll be sure to ask the LofA volume's editor, Robert Polito, the reason for the omission when we meet in good fellowship at Noircon 2012 in November.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Dan J. Marlowe, Robert Silverberg, and weekends in Philadelphia

"`Stop somewhere and I'll pick up a bottle of Scotch.'  

 "`This is Sunday, remember? In Philadelphia." 

 — Dan J. Marlowe, One Endless Hour 

 "`It's 12:01 Saturday night,' I said. `Which means you can't legally buy a drink in Philadelphia.'"  

— Robert Silverberg, Blood on the Mink 

  © 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

The more crime changes ...

I've been taking myself to crime school, reading some dark American classics for the first time. First up was Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us (1937), where I found a passage that might be of interest to readers in today's America (or Europe, for that matter):

“`He really knew you, did he?'

“`Sure he did. But I never did let on, see. He says to me: "Boy, I just wish you had got this bank here 'fore it went busted and took my wad. I'd rather for a poor boy like you to have it than them goddamned bankers. Both of them bankers are out of prison now and still living swell on what they stole from me and about four or five hundred more folks here."'”

Have you experienced a similar thrill of recognition when reading an old book? What passages from old crime novels strike you as torn straight from today's headlines, possibly more relevant today than ever?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012