Literary Birthday – 1 July – James M. Cain

James M. Cain was born on 1 July 1892 and died on 27 October 1977.

James M. Cain Quotes

1. In one respect [the short story] is greatly superior to the novel, or at any rate, the American novel. It is one kind of fiction that need not, to please the American taste, deal with heroes. Our national curse, if so perfect a land can have such a thing, is the ‘sympathetic’ character…. I take exception to this idealism. (Editor Eric)
2. Yet if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one…. I have read less than twenty pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in my whole life…. (Preface to The Butterfly)
3. I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else. (Preface to The Butterfly)
4. A lot of novelists start late—[Joseph] Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter…. (James M. Cain)
5. Too good is too easy. If it’s too easy you have to worry. If you’re not lying awake at night worrying about it, the reader isn’t going to, either. I always know that when I get a good night’s sleep, the next day I’m not going to get any work done. Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational. (The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 69)
6. I take no interest in violence. There’s more violence in Macbeth and Hamlet than in my books. I don’t write whodunits. You can’t end a story with the cops getting the killer. I don’t think the law is a very interesting nemesis. I write love stories. (The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 69)
7. I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort. (The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 69)
8. If you can’t write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories. (A-Z)
9. I write of the wish that comes true–for some reason, a terrifying thought. (A-Z)

James M. Cain was an American novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as an originator of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction. He was ranked with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as one of the masters of the genre. He wrote ‘stark, fast-paced novels, featuring ordinary people driven to crime by passion, lust, and desperation. His prose is direct, economical, and gritty, reflecting the harsh lives he depicted. He set his stories in Southern California during the Depression.’ His novels The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), Serenade (1937), Mildred Pierce (1941) and The Butterfly (1947) brought him critical acclaim and an immense popular readership in America and abroad. Several of his novels were made into highly regarded films. In 1974, Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. His writing has been translated into 19 languages and adaptations of his work have been made in French, Italian, Hungarian, and German.

Source for photograph: Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, photograph by George W. Vassar, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson
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