James M. Cain Books

Required reading for all natives and denizens of Los Angeles. A dark romp thru our fair city. Accompany Mildred as she traverses LA's golden past- shop with her at Bullocks Wilshire, sweat bullets in the passenger seat as she navigates the Glendale freeway during the flood of 1938, pine for Pasadena, pray that her girls get into Marlborough, imagine singing at the Hollywood Bowl, and marvel as our heroine with the great gams builds an empire out of chicken and waffles - of all things! Mildred is no ordinary pie maker, she's Los Angeles incarnate. Joan Crawford may have won an Oscar for her portrayal in 1945, but Cain's 1941 novel more evenly balances Mildred's capacity for good against a city steeped in bad seeds. And while the film presents Mildred's daughter, Veda, as simply spoiled and shrill, Cain's study presents her as the fully fleshed out viper to which all true divas secretly aspire. Read it and weep. ~ Lili N. Barsha 5/2008

Mildred Pierce proves the old adage that love is blind. Mildred proves that with the men in her life, but even more so with her daughter. Mildred is like many people who can't see the faults in her child, and even when she does she squeezes her eyes even tighter shut. I found this book to be much more captivating than Cain's more popular The Postman Always Rings Twice. This book is timeless, and the characters as believable today as the day they were driven.

I was inspired to read Mildred Pierce after hearing Wesltey Strick, screenwriter and novelists, discuss his new novel on Elvis Mitchell's NPR radio show "The Treatment." Strick said to get in the mood for his own writing, he reread Mildred Pierce and I was intrigued. I had read some other Cain novels and knew he was a master of terse crime fiction but I wasn't prepared for the psychological insight and complexity evident here. His descriptions of American gaucherie and philistinism are unparalleled. His complexity between the mother and daughter is unforced.

The plot, about a Billy Goat husband who leaves his pretty wife for a trashy woman in Southern California circa the Depression, begins simply enough, but spins into penetrating psychological pathology.

His ability to capture America's sense of the American Dream and bad taste reminds me of Paula Fox's novella Desperate Characters and a masterful essay by William E. Blundell's "My Florida," published in the 2005 edition of The Best American Travel Writing.

A man tends to his lawn, showers, gets dressed, tells his wife that he's going for a walk. She knows better --- he's going to see his mistress "and then unbutton that red dress she's always wearing without any brassieres under it." But it's not the mistress that annoys her most. It's the way, in 1931, he's without work and not exactly looking for any.

So far, so ordinary.

Then the author steps in: "They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to cooled with spit. "

That's James M. Cain, folks, the master of the quick, dark truth.

When Cain wrote "Mildred Pierce," his fame and fortune were assured. In the 1930s, he had published "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity." These two short, brutal novels had scandalized the bluenoses and become bestsellers. He'd found a formula that, in a repressed culture, never fails --- serving up hot, illicit sex and then punishing the lovers.

In "Mildred Pierce," he adapted the formula and, in the process, wrote what I believe is his best novel. Here the shapely, sexy woman is a wife and mother who wants to stay married. She throws her husband out as a statement of self-respect. It's a costly gesture. As a friend says, "You've joined the biggest army on earth. You're the great American institution that never gets mentioned on Fourth of July --- a grass widow with two small children to support. The dirty bastards."

Mildred's assets are few. She can bake. And she's got a bod for sin. "Her brassiere ballooned a little, with an extremely seductive burden." Although she's got great gams, she feels she's slightly bow-legged, so she takes short steps when she walks. To great effect --- "her bottom twitched in a wholly provocative way."

It's not long before two realities collide. She has no trouble finding a lover (and discovering that she enjoys sex) --- but it's impossible to get a job. For one thing, she is without qualifications. For another, she fears that her eldest daughter, the beautiful and haughty Veda, will scorn her if she wears a waitress's uniform or becomes a clerk in a store.

But a waitress she becomes. And money flows in. Veda is, as expected, horrified. She says Mildred has "degraded" the family. Mildred's response: She spanks Veda silly. To no point. Veda crawls to a couch, laughs and whispers: "A waitress."

It is then that Mildred realizes that she fears her daughter's judgment, "her snobbery, her contempt, her unbreakable spirit." She resolves to open a restaurant, to be a waitress no more. And she thanks her daughter for prodding her to aim higher: "We'll have something. And it'll all be on account of you. Every good thing that happens is on account of you, if Mother only had the good sense to know it."

On the eve of the opening of Mildred's restaurant, she spends the weekend with a society swell and becomes his lover. Back home, her younger daughter has spiked a fever and is in the hospital. The death scene is terrible. Even worse is Mildred's reaction: Thank God it wasn't Veda.

Death and birth collide: As she buries her child, Mildred opens her restaurant. It's a great success. But we have half a book to go, and this half is a slow-mo train wreck --- the story of Veda's evil ways, her schemes to escape her mother and Mildred's shameless effort to win her love.

You think your kids have foul, disrespectful mouths? Listen to Veda: "With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls."

Through it all, Mildred is Mother Courage. Her will and her work ethic dazzle. But can Veda be redeemed?

In the movie --- directed by Michael ("Casablanca") Curtiz and starring Joan Crawford, her shoulders so padded she could be a linebacker --- the story is changed for greater dramatic effect. In the book, there's no need; this time, the female is punished and punished and punished, though she's done nothing to deserve it.

"Mildred Pierce" is twice as long as "Postman" and "Double Indemnity" --- and, say I, twice as satisfying. Face it, you're not likely to take a married lover and then kill his/her spouse. But most parents have, at one time or another, a child whose ingratitude is sharper than a serpent's tooth. Well, here's the worst case --- read it and weep for Mildred, then count your blessings.

The book and the movie are both great. The content of this book was a little unusual for the 1940s. I was surprised that the book has a totally different ending than the movie. I have seen the movie several times, and decided to read the book. I am so glad I did, and my husband really enjoyed this book too. Mildred is a great character. She was a woman before her time. Stepping out to have her own business. Not too many women in those times would have had the courage to do such a thing. Her daughter, Veda, is a BRAT. Mildred is a "disney land" parent. She thinks the more she gives the more her daughter will love her. This is a good example for divorced parents today. They feel compelled to give their kids too many "material" things and they really just need to spend more time with their children and learn to say "No". If you haven't read or seen the movie, I would suggest you do both.

I enjoyed the first 2/3 of the book, although the racist epitaphs and negative descriptions of Mexicans and other foreigners were turning me off. But I was enjoying the flavor and style of the book. There are some really beautiful, poetic passages; The one in the church during the rainstorm, and his emtpy attempt to reinforce his sexuality with a prostitute. However, in the last third, where the plot took a left turn into the writers latent homosexuality (All men have 5% of that in them!) and his mexican prostitute/lover's reaction to that, the book completely lost me. The book immediately seemed dated,and the whole plot twist seemed awkward and forced. It pretty much ruined the book for me as far as the change of tone, and the whole ridiculousness of the twist. But, for 1937 I guess it was 'daring' and risque'. By todays standards it seemed pretty silly and naive. I like Cain, but this won't be on my top shelf. Nicely written and paced, but kind of like watching "Reefer Madness".

Taken in parts or out of the context of when it was written, this book could offend some sensibilities.

Taken as a whole, this book can be compared to a spur of the moment road trip through the hills and backcountry that goes tragically awry. And a trip it is, filled with twists and turns that were certainly not on the map! Enjoy!

Everyone should read three James M. Cains: "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "Double Indemnity," and "Serenade." His writing reached its peak with these three. The first two are hard-boiled and terse and nasty, and they move like bullets to their sordid ends. But "Serenade" is almost lyrically operatic, in keeping with the soap opera that is the protagonist's love life. This tremendously forward-looking and unpredictable (and brief and economical) book melds a number of Cain's loves into a tapestry of nearly ludicrous proportions. Read it! You won't be disappointed.

James M Cain's 1937 novel "Serenade"is, as the title suggests a love story, but a very dark and devious love story it is indeed. In keeping with its musical motif, it seems to be constructed in the symphonic form, thus:Chapters I-IV Andante Chapters V-VII Allegro Chapters VIII-X Scherzo Chapters XI-XIV Adagio. The hero-narrator John Howard Sharp is suppose to be an operatic baritone, but he talks and acts like a film noir P.I. Not that opera singers can't be macho, but I have a little difficulty picturing Humphrey Bogart playing Rigoletto. Prepare yourself for a very politically incorrect tone: A homosexual is a fag, a Japanese is a Jap, and a Mexican is a "spig" -- I assume he means spick. (This is 1937 so "gay" means "happy".) The mood is quite masculine, as are 95% of the characters, so it comes as a surprise when it's revealed that the hero has indulged in what use to be coyly called the love that dare not speak its name. The only major female character is Juana, the puta whom Sharp meets in Mexico City in the opening chapter. Throughout the story she seems to be the "dumb muchacha" she describes herself as; but she abruptly becomes a femme fatale, her desperate act of hatred driving the plot to its somber conclusion. The story opens and ends in Mexico, the interim describing the hero's entertaining though somewhat implausible successes in California and New York. In the Scherzo section, when Sharp is being courted by both the Met and the movies, Cain treats the Met with deference but his contempt for Hollywood is palpable. (Ironically enough, in 1956 Warner Bros used "Serenade" as the basis for a Mario Lanza musical. One can only imagine Cain's reaction to this sudsy mess.) Incidently, Cain's novels are included in Crime and Mystery sections. Appropriate, perhaps, but don't expect Miss Marple.

Compared to his earlier and much better The Postman Always Rings Twice, which tells a story as taut and inevitable as a Greek tragedy, James M. Cain's Serenade offers a plot as giddily rococo and improbable as the grandest of operas. I suppose that's appropriate, as this is the only hard-boiled novel I know of that features an opera singer hero/narrator; he may sing Rossini, but he talks like the sort of tough guy Bogart and Mitchum used to play. The settings have an operatic range as well, running the gamut from a verismo account of Depression-era Mexico to a phantasmagorically high-camp vision of New York's 1930s gay bohemia.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm making this book sound like more fun than it is. The last third of this relatively short novel explores an intense, unusual (and, I suppose, daring for its time) sexual triangle leading to a crime and its ultimate punishment. The first two-thirds, however, are slow-going, as we follow John Howard Sharp, a down-and-out opera singer in Mexico, as he falls in love with Juana, an Aztec princess variant on the prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold theme. After a brief romantic idyll in an empty church on the way to Acapulco, during which Sharp displays the sort of wilderness survival skills not seen since the heyday of James Fenimore Cooper (and at the same time regains his singing voice), the pair flee north to Los Angeles, where Sharp becomes the overnight star of Nelson Eddy-esque Hollywood musicals.

Then the story gets good. Dissatisfied with his success in movies, Sharp comes to New York to sing at the Met (Juana comes along to take night school classes in English) and reencounters his old mentor/tormentor Winston Hawes, a fabulously wealthy composer, conductor and apostle of the love that dared not speak its name (at least back in 1937). While the plot from here is riveting without being particularly surprising, I don't want to give anything away.

If the whole novel were as good as this last section, it would merit at least another star. However, if you are easily offended by outmoded social attitudes toward Mexicans and gays (in other words, if you don't read anything that borders on the racist or homophobic), please deduct a star or avoid this book altogether. For my part, I certainly think Serenade deserves to be in print, although I'd say anyone new to Cain would do well to read Postman and Double Indemnity first.

Jess Tyler lives alone in a mountain shack until a young woman shows up at his door one day. He is powerfully attracted to her, even when he finds out that she is his long-lost daughter. This is only the first twist in a densely plotted novella that plays out among the poverty-stricken mountain people of West Virginia. James M. Cain takes his characters to some very dark places, hurling them from the heights of joy to the blackest pits of despair. What a ride!

Cain portrays the dark sides of his characters so vividly that you come away with the queasy feeling that such people might actually exist. You might also come away feeling grateful that you are who you are, and not them.

Jess Tyler lives alone, up at the edge of a worked-out coal mine. He has a farm plot and a few animals, but that's about it. He had another life once, or maybe more than one, but that's behind him. Then, one day, a part of that past stands in front of him. It's a young woman that he's drawn to so strongly that he has no choice in the matter. He doesn't know who she is, just that she feels right in his arms and in his bed. The problem is, it's the daughter he never saw grow up. With her, his quiet, upright life begins to topple. More of the past arrives, and not just his past. The tensions that tore his old life away from him arrive too, as taut as ever or more. Cain's story unfolds with the lethal inevitability of an end game in chess. As the strategy of each piece emerges, the need to attack or defend increases in urgency. The heat of flaring hatreds creates a pressure that builds, down to the last page.

Cain wrote his own introduction to this story. It's written in the same way as his fiction, so that every word matters and every thought is so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Maybe Cain isn't as well known as Hammet or Chandler, but he ranks right with them as a founder of noir as we know it.

//wiredweird, reviewing the 1979 Ace edition

You must read this book for the last sentence. It is the best ever written. Don't skip ahead, just take the time, read it and get to that beautiful, perfect sentence. You won't be diasapointed.

This story is vey interesting and unbelievable. It's about a man name Jess who was separated from his own daughter when she was just a baby. After many years have past, they both met each other by his house having a conversation. Jess fell in love with her without knowing that she's his own daughter, and goes for her. I rate this boo an "8" because of it's uncommon story that can never be accepted in our society.

'Butterfly' is the latest of several James M. Cain novels I've read. Unfortunately it seems that beyond his best known works ('The Postman Always Rings Twice', 'Mildred Pierce', 'Double Indemnity') he has pumped out a number of mediocre novels, including 'Butterfly'.

'Butterfly' is a novel on incest in a coal mining community in rural West Virginia during the 1930s. No doubt the story was shocking when first written (in 1946) but now the material seems fairly lame. The essence of older man/teenaged girl lust is captured much better in the infamous 'Lolita'. In 'Butterfly' we don't get to really feel smoldering passion or the intense shame associated with incest. While the prose is very readable the characterizations are fairly weak, as one would expect in a novel of little more than 100 pages.

Bottom line: James M. Cain on a bad day is still pretty okay, but he has done much better (especially in 'Mildred Pierce').

What is Cain is good. His narrators are always people that just don't get it, whatever it is that defines the morality that you and I take for granted. In this case, the narrator is a teenaged girl. She's ringingly aware of her emerging womanhood, as is the creepy stepfather. And there's a "real" father in the background somewhere. Unseen and unknown, she builds an elaborate happy-family fantasy around him. (That fantasy is believable. I've seen it happen.)

Then things fall apart. Family stresses reach the rupture point, and she runs. That "real" father doesn't live up the fantasy, of course, so Mandy looks elsewhere for the reward she wants. Alone, she looks in the wrong places, and becomes involved with a botched bank robbery, three murders, and a sweet-talking psychopath. That creates the noir setting that Cain handled so masterfully.

But pieces just didn't fit. For one, James Cain never seemed to present the teenage girl's voice in a completely convincing way. For another, the story has a happy ending - so Cain was way out of his element. Lots of other details grated against each other, too. I didn't know until I finished the book that this was published posthumously, but I was pretty sure by the time I finished it. If he had been happy with the work, he would have published it himself back when it was originally written - probably the early 1960s, or near there. Taken as a finished work, I found this a disappointing addition to Cain's ouvre. Taken as a sketch or work in progress when he died, I found it more interesting. It shows an early stage of a story's development, leaving me wishing that he had finished it.

//wiredweird

(3.5 stars) Published in 1985, eight years after James M. Cain's death, this novel is atypical of Cain's work. Using a sixteen-year-old girl, Amanda Vernick, as the main character and speaker, he focuses on the ways in which she is hurt by older men--abused by her stepfather and exploited by other men with whom she comes in contact. Developing sympathy for her in the course of the novel, Cain is far from the "hard-boiled" stylist one expects from his earlier work, and his dialogue, instead of being clipped and abrupt, reflects the thinking of an inexperienced teenager as she reflects on and tries to justify many of her actions.

Mandy has had a hard life with a mother who has had two "husbands," the last of whom has been abusing Mandy sexually from the time she was thirteen, with her mother's knowledge. When she decides to leave home in search of her real father, she meets Rick, a 19-year-old boy, on the bus, and he suggests that they share the cost of a room. Later a gang of thieves makes their acquaintance and decides to use them in the grand heist of a Baltimore bank, with Mandy driving the getaway car. Events become more complicated when the holdup goes awry and people are killed. Mandy's attempt to reclaim her life, become a "good girl," and live safely constitute the main action of the book.

Throughout the novel, Mandy is looking for her "enchanted isle," a place where she can feel safe, protected, and most of all, loved. The novel focuses as much on her character as it does on the action, unlike other Cain novels, and instead of being "noir" in style, it verges on the sentimental and works toward a happy ending. Though the narrative moves quickly and has its bloody moments, the reader's attention is drawn primarily to the effects of the action on Mandy, not on the excitement of plot for its own sake. A far cry from Double Indemnity and many of the novels Cain wrote in the 1940s, this is Cain at his most melodramatic. n Mary Whipple

Although the story line of this book is Pres. Harding's administration in the early 1920s, there is a relevance to today's presidential political scene. For example, Harding engaged in illicit sexual affairs which the author exemplifies by Harding's "jollying" of a young women in a White House broom closet. Pres. Clinton did his in the oval office. Also Harding was not one of this nation's most intelligent presidents. And in the current presidential election there is a question about the intelligence of one of the candidates. The author chose a real person,H. L. Mencken to conduct a fictionalized investigation of the corruption in Harding's administraion. The author also tries to depict Mencken as he revealed himself in his writings and as he was depicted in his biographies. Mencken, perhaps the nation's most famous iconoclast who had an opinion on everything in American society, relishes his role in this book of observing and commenting on the morons and clowns in Harding's administration known as the "Ohio Gang" who Harding brought with him to Washington. They are also real people who appear in the book. Harding's attorney general was tried twice for his misdeeds. His secretary of the interior and his director of the the Veterans Bureau were imprisoned. Mencken is paired with another real person, James Cain, who is best know for his hard-boiled crime fiction. This duo takes the reader on an entertaining tour of Harding's corrupt Washington. And along the way readers will meet such literary notables as Henry Luce and Sinclair Lewis. There is also a fictionalized sexual affair by Cain and a real woman who was the darling of the Washington press corp when she testified in real life against Harding's attorney general at a senate hearing. The entertaining part of this novel are Mencken's conversatins which permeate the book

As another reviewer stated, sort of a blend of The Postman Always Rings Twice/Double Indemnity type story - hero immediately falls in love with and wants to marry murderous woman. Does her bidding, regrets it, ridiculous ending. I mean, do people really abandon their moral code that quickly and easily? I don't believe so, therefore the whole premise seemed outlandish.

This 'Magician's Wife' is not Moore's story set in France/Europe. It is, instead, a story of lust, adultery, and wish fulfillment set 1940's Virginia.

A master of American noir, Cain spins a suspense-filled that reminds you to be careful what you wish for.

The Magician's Wife is a mediocre rendition of some of Cain's classic novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Although it starts off slowly, it does build up a head of steam and if you ignore some of the unbelievable actions of the protagonist, the charismatic meat-magnate, Clay Lockwood, it is a hard book to put down. More or less the plot is a fellow (this time a successful executive) has an affair with a married woman and after much arm-twisting chooses to help her murder her husband for money. The magician's wife is clearly not someone worth murdering for and at the same time Clay carries on an affair with her mother, Grace, which is one of the absurd elements of this novel. Like a magician, Cain works out interesting plot twists around these incongruencies and somehow makes it a compelling read. Nonetheless he is not in great form, for a key scene where Clay scopes out the magician whom he is plotting to kill and sees him performing tricks for some kids in his neighborhood would by Cain's standards be rendered in grand fashion as the potential killer feels remorse and anguish in discovering that his victim is a regular and decent guy. Somehow in The Magician's Wife this scene is barely sketched out leaving out, so to speak, The Mark of Cain.

I have only read Serenade out of the three novels in this book, so that is what this review concerns.

James M. Cain wrote in the first person, from the criminals perspective. His storytellers are not usually hardened criminals, yet through circumstances commit the most atrocious of crimes. He writes about down trodden, out of luck schmucks, who fall for the wrong kind of girl. Interestingly, it is usually his women who are tough, manipulative, and full of lust for crime. The men tend to be suckered in by their seductive charms.

Serenade centers around a down and out opera singer, John Howard Sharp. He is so down on his luck that he's been singing in a small club in Mexico, before, even they, kick him out. His luck seems to change when he meets a cheap whore, whom he falls with. His love for her causes his once faultering voice, to come back. What follows is a transcontinental series of adventures cataloging John's skyrocket rise in both movies and the New York opera, and his subsequent fall.

There is plenty to like about Serenade. Cain's terse, cynical prose moves across the page like a song. He accurately portrays John's love and hatred for his Mexican whore. There are plenty of nice character moments. Moments that give just the right details that give meaning to ordinary events. Much of the "action" of the story revolves around the little moments of life: sitting in a room talking to friends, stroking the hair of a girl, listening to music. Cain understands that much of life is filled with these types of moment and that great changes and meaning can be found in them.

Before Cain became a writer, he was trained as a singer. In part, this novel seems to be an attempt for him to allow his musical knowledge and training come to some use. Throughout the book John converses about, or describes internally, music he likes and hates, musicians, and his own singing. Some of this is vitally important to the story, for he is a professional singer, and the plot concerns his successes as such. Yet it is so infused with information that it, at times, feels more like a trade magazine than a proper story. At only 136 pages, it is superfluous to fill so many with discussions on Puccini and Mozart.

There is a revealing moment about John's character in the last third of the book. Even while reading this in 2005 it seemed shocking. Yet it is treated with aplomb, handled with an experts hand. The feelings that arise out of the character seem true, if no entirely kind. It is also interesting to see how that particular issue was handled at that time.

Overall, Serenade is an interesting read. It is well written and the characters are well drawn. However, if you have never read anything by James M. Cain, I would recommend picking up The Postman Always Rings Twice and then Double Indemnity before I began reading this

[...]

I just looked at a few questions (5th edition) in one chapter. There were numerous errors (check questions 29 and 30 on page 238). That was a small random sample but would dissuade me from recommending this review book.

The book doesn't cover all topics deep enough to get a 4 on the exam. It even skips many topics. There is no proof of how equations are derived. The practice test is no where near the actual AP exam, especially the multiple choice section. College Board has increased the difficulties of that section significantly over the last 3 or 4 years.

Terrible for three reasons:
1. Answers to sample tests are often wrong
2. Review is confusing and incomplete
3. The Physics B sample test covers material not on the exam (angular acceleration, etc.)