American author of
crime fiction, born
1892 in
Annapolis, MD, died
1977 somewhere else in
Maryland.
With few exceptions, Cain's entire life took place between those two years. He served in
WWI, and wrote for the
Baltimore American and the
Baltimore Sun from
1917 to
1923. At the
American he met everybody's favorite
ubermensch H.L. Mencken, and published in
The American Mercury. When
Harold Ross at
The New Yorker ran
amok collecting journalists in the
1930s, he collected Cain in
1931. Cain escaped within a year, fleeing to the
West Coast, where he wrote for the movies until
1947.
Cain is best known for a pair of scarily good novels:
The Postman Always Rings Twice (
1934) and
Double Indemnity (
1936). Another novel,
Mildred Pierce (
1941) was made into a movie in
1944 starring
Joan Crawford.
The only Cain I've read is
Postman and
Double Indemnity, so that's all I can discuss, but discuss I must.
Both of those novels are written in the
first person, and Cain is at great pains to mimic the speech and outlook of "common men" -- a
drifter and an
insurance salesman, respectively. They're both
psychological studies, attempts to get inside the heads of seemingly
ordinary people who do strange and terrible things. They're
sordid little people who wake up to some kind of
moral sense only after it's too late, if at all (how well was he named, or what?!). It's grim stuff, but hard to put down.
Cain wrote lots else, the most gloriously named being
The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction,
1981 (that'd be
posthumous, if I can trust my
arithmetic).