"This was going to be such a lousy murder it wouldn't even be a murder. It was going to be just a regular road accident, with guys drunk, and booze in the car, and all the rest. " (from The Postman Always Rings Twice)
For my dough, when it comes to the hard-boiled noir fiction of the 1940s & 50s, nobody did it better than James Cain. His novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and, Mildred Pierce were all successful enough for Hollywood to come calling. You can have your Raymond Chandler and Dash Hammett, I'll take Cain's easy, street-wise style of telling a story not from a private investigator's POV, but from the wary eyes of the lovable loser. Such was his Frank Chambers, the young drifter in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Frank stops at a roadside cafe where me meets the beautiful Cora, wife of the cafe's owner, Nick (the Greek). It's instant sparks between Frank and Cora. And well, as you might guess from this genre, it isn't Frank so much as it is Cora's idea to bump off Nick to gain her freedom and Nick's money. Frank goes along because he's in lust with Cora, but just as in Double Indemnity, things start to go wrong pretty fast, and before Frank knows it, he's already in too deep to pull out. Cain has a way of putting the reader into the head and skin of Frank every bit as much as Dostoevsky made his readers squirm when he put us into the mind of the young student killer, Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment.
And this really is the writer's obligation, to make his characters and situations truer than true (as Hemingway advocated). What readers identify with most is the universality of a situation, because we've all made wrong choices and regretted them and therefore can or should feel a certain degree of empathy for such characters in novels and on the screen. Nobody could make you feel the passion and panic of his characters the way Cain could. He wrote in a straightforward way with effortless power - like a punch in the mouth or a passionate kiss, his prose was like the weight of a gun in your pocket and imbued you with the highs and lows that lust and greed imposes.
Cain, like many talented writers, was plagued by booze and women but he had a long and productive life and contributed greatly to the American literary landscape. Go raise a little Cain, I recommend him highly.
Some Stuff that Happened on This day in History (why is it never Herstory?)
Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55 of Bright's Disease (1886) - the opening stanza from I Could Not Stop for Death seems especially poignant to me today:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality
Nylon stockings went on sale for the first time (1940) - ooh-la-la and the world went to hell in a hand basket when some guy invented pantyhose.
Anne Boleyn - 2nd wife of Henry VIII (a rather crazy fellow to say the least) was accused by him of adultery and incest with 4 men of the King's court and her brother George. All were executed, including Anne who wore a dark gray gown of damask trimmed in fur with a red petticoat underneath. Only a woman would bother to dress so fine at her own beheading. A guy would have probably wore a pair of old boxers, flip flops and a torn tee shirt.
...and so it goes
While Big Sal was snoozing on the sofa I stole the vault key and found this:
To All Those Who Go Home Again
I feel sad for those who
Return to the places they’d
Left thinking they were wrong
To have gone in the 1st
Place and now that they’re back
Thank God. For, what
They failed to realize is the
Reason they left in
The 1st place: the great
Disdain that rose like
Bile in their throats from
Walking the same streets
& eating in the same cafes
& falling in and out of love
& fucking the same people
and dreaming the same dreams
over and over and over again
to the point they felt they
had no choice but to leave
and start over someplace
New, live on different streets,
eat in new cafes, meet new people to
fuck and fall in love with. & now
They’re back to the beginning
And surely they will realize at some point
Why they left and will
soon enough want to leave again.
be well, do right, never bathe with your shoes on.
http://www.authorbillbrooks.com/
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