In this and other respects, the Saint’s 1930s persona actually feels much more contemporary than the 1960s TV version, like a cross between Che Guevara and the Clint Eastwood characters of that time. In one story, “The Wonderful War,” he even succeeds where Guevara later failed, overthrowing a Latin American government almost single-handedly.
The Million Pound Day ends with Teal frustrated, and the detective’s hunger for revenge underpins the third novella. The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal is a semicomic tale of stolen diamonds, which the Saint wants to steal from the original thieves, and features a more-nuanced-than-usual look at the hero. Halfway through the story, the Saint tells Teal that he has been paying money into the detective’s bank account, and will destroy his career with accusations of corruption if denied a free pass. Now, there’s nothing nasty about Teal, and even Patricia Holm, the Saint’s long-term girlfriend, is disgusted by this maneuver.
The couple made a joint debut in the very first novel, and she appears in a good proportion of the next twenty-five. They obviously share a bed, although this is never spelled out. She’s not an artistic foil like Wimsey’s Harriet Vane, Alleyn’s Agatha Troy, or Grant’s Marta Hallard, but a highly effective partner in crime. And she’s not the only one. Women like Audrey Perowne in “The Lawless Lady,” Loretta Page in Saint Overboard, and Jill Trelawney in She Was a Lady are fully capable of living by their strength, nerve, and wits—the last book was even retitled The Saint Meets His Match. Neurotic or empty-headed females are, by contrast, in surprisingly short supply. When, at the end of Melancholy Journey, the Saint offers Pat his vision of their future—“racketing around the world, doing everything that’s utterly and gloriously mad—swaggering, swashbuckling, singing—showing all these dreary dogs what can be done with life”—she simply cries back: “I’m ready for it all!”
He has already redeemed himself by handing Teal a notebook with enough detailed intelligence on criminal operations to guarantee a promotion. Melancholy Journey ends in characteristic fashion; the Saint catches up with the first thief, obtains and puts on the trousers with the sewn-in diamonds, and locks the man in the trunk of a fellow passenger—a prudish spinster named Lovedew. Having labeled the trunk with Teal’s name, he introduces the detective to Miss Lovedew—“Mr Claud Eustace Teal, who is going to tell us about his wanderings in Northern Euthanasia . . . ”—before slipping away with the boodle.
In most respects, The Holy Terror is a typical Saint book, but in one—the nature of his enemies—it is not. The Saint spent a lot of time fighting and fleecing traditional criminals, but a large part of his appeal lay in his willingness to take on those whom the law could not, and mention should be made of one such story. “The Sleepless Knight” was included in Boodle (aka The Saint Intervenes), which was published in 1934, two years after The Holy Terror and smack in the middle of the Great Depression. It begins, as several Saint stories do, with the hero reading a newspaper article. This one concerns the charging of a lorry driver with manslaughter after he’s run down and killed a cyclist; his defense is that he was ordered—on pain of dismissal and unemployment—to drive more hours than anyone could safely manage. The judge acquits the driver and notes in passing that it should have been the company’s owner, Sir Melvin Flager, standing there in the dock. But the fat cat, having done nothing illegal, is beyond punishment.
The Saint decides otherwise. He kidnaps Sir Melvin, straps him to the wheel of a driving simulator for two days and nights, and flogs him each time his imaginary vehicle slips off the imaginary road.
It’s now eighty years since the first Saint book was published, and of course they’re showing their age. But beautifully constructed plots are always that, and the Saint’s trademark blend of murderous idealism still seems remarkably relevant to the world in which we live. Neither toffs nor criminals have grown any less venal, and a contemporary Holy Terror would certainly be spoiled for choice when it came to potential adversaries. A modern-day Saint would no doubt cross swords with al-Qaeda and the Russian mafia, but he would also find time for the odd merchant banker.
David Downing is the author of the Station series set in Berlin before, during, and after World War II. He has also written other novels (The Red Eagles), two works of “faction” (The Moscow Option and Russian Revolution 1985), and many books on military history, rock music, cinema, and the history of football. A Londoner, he has also lived in the United States, and traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is currently developing a new series of novels set before, during, and after World War I.
Fast One
by Paul Cain (1933)
CHUCK HOGAN
* * *
Paul Cain was the pseudonym of George Carol Sims (1902–66), the son of a police detective, who wrote seventeen short stories for Black Mask magazine and one novel, the seminal title Fast One, which was published in 1933. Sims had some success in Hollywood as a screenwriter during the 1930s, writing under the pseudonym Peter Ruric. A collection of Paul Cain’s short stories, Seven Slayers, was published in 1950.
* * *
Raymond Chandler famously called Fast One “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.”
Chandler’s first detective story appeared in Black Mask magazine in December 1933, the same year that Fast One—originally serialized over five issues the previous year—was published. His quote is always cited as praise, but one can just as easily envision this failed-oil-executive-turned-aspiring-pulp-writer reading Cain’s breakneck tale and wondering, “What is left for me?”
Black Mask editor Joseph “Cap” Shaw paid his top authors three cents a word, while demanding they squeeze a nickel’s worth out of each one. By 1932, Dashiell Hammett’s naturalistic detective fiction had defined and elevated the Black Mask style well beyond its crude beginnings, and Shaw wisely made the magazine conform to the ex–Pinkerton operative’s image. Later, Chandler would take hard-boiled prose on a long left turn into booze-soaked romanticism, before dropping it off at the cul-de-sac of parody.
Paul Cain (never to be confused with The Postman Always Rings Twice author James M. Cain) is the missing link between these two genre godfathers. He represents not a transitional phase, but a hard stop between two distinct styles. Cain took the Hammett ethos and, with the zeal of a mad disciple, followed it all the way to the end. Whereas Hammett was in the practice of giving readers a little more than they wanted (pathos, depth), Cain gave his Depression-era readers exactly what they wanted, times a factor of ten.
On October 29, 1933, the New York Times reviewed the novel under the headline “Gangsters Gone Mad”: “It is in truth a ceaseless welter of bloodshed and frenzy, a sustained bedlam of killing and fiendishness.” Also: sadism, malaise, anarchy.
If pulp fiction is the id of literature, then Fast One is the id of the id.
Kells walked north on Spring. At Fifth he turned west, walked two blocks, turned into a small cigar store. He nodded to the squat bald man behind the counter and went through the ground-glass-paneled door into a large and bare back room.
To sum up the first paragraph: a guy runs errands through a creative lack of punctuation and omitted words. The least enticing opening in history? Perhaps in terms of content.
But what this opening paragraph does achieve is an immediate sense of urgency. Perpetual motion is the hallmark of Fast One, and one of its many pleasures. Notice that Cain makes no effort to engage the reader. There is no pretense of seduction, of meeting the book buyer halfway. The story and its main character are in midstride before your eyes hit the page. You hop on board Fast One like a passing streetcar, only to have it blow through stop after stop, speeding toward the inevitable crash at the end of the line.
The plot—the tale of a man caught between two warring gangs, who is framed for murder—shares elements with Hammett’s Red Harvest. Gerry Kells is a neutral gambler who wants to be left alone, but he soon realizes that true freedom can be won only through the destruction of these two op
pressive forces. So he plays “the middle against both ends,” finding that his only chance for survival lies in taking over the rackets himself.
The story is oneiric and surreal, full of betrayals, double crosses, and ambushes. The violence is unrelenting, a tour de force veering into madness. To modern eyes, Fast One’s existentialism is inescapable. Like his characters, Cain breaks rules, cutting words for effect and often setting off dialogue lines with colons rather than commas. To wit:
Kells said: “Uh huh.”
The colon makes you stop. It gives the line an extra pause, a kick. You adjust to it quickly, and these bumps become part of the tempo, part of the cadence. The staccato rhythm gulls you into a trance, and things happen in the story that are beyond logic, but by then you are dreaming and the dream is a free fall toward death.
Fast One, Paul Cain’s only novel, stands high above the rest of the so-called two-fisted tales of the era because Cain takes the form that Hammett and Shaw established and does something with it: he drives it straight off a cliff.
She jerked the wheel suddenly, hard, screamed between clenched teeth.
Kells felt the beginning of the skid; he looked outward, forward into blackness. They were in space, falling sidewise into blackness; there was grinding, tearing, crashing sound. Falling. Black.
Fast One embraces this distinctly American genre so completely that it obliterates it. No one else ever wrote a book like this.
Chuck Hogan is the New York Times best-selling author of several acclaimed novels, including Devils in Exile and Prince of Thieves, which was awarded the Hammett Prize for “literary excellence in the field of crime writing,” and was adapted into the film The Town, directed by and starring Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, and Jon Hamm. He is also the coauthor, with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), of the international bestselling Strain Trilogy, published in twenty-nine languages. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and ESPN The Magazine, and his short fiction has twice been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories annual.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
by James M. Cain (1934)
JOSEPH FINDER
* * *
One of a trio of writers, alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, credited with creating the hard-boiled novel, James M. Cain (1892–1977) first worked as a journalist before establishing his reputation as an author. Early novels such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Mildred Pierce (1941), and Double Indemnity (1943, but originally published in serial form in Liberty Magazine in 1936) were notable for their spare prose, authentic dialogue, and dubious morality—the latter, presumably, prompting Raymond Chandler to dismiss Cain as “a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.” A long-lost manuscript of Cain’s, The Cocktail Waitress, was published in 2012 by Hard Case Crime.
* * *
James M. Cain never understood why he was so often labeled a hard-boiled writer. “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” he said. “I tried to write as people talk.” He wasn’t referring to his dialogue but his style, his narrative voice. When his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, came out in 1934, that very style—plainspoken, colloquial, vernacular, whatever you want to call it—was so arrestingly different that it changed the course of crime fiction.
If you haven’t yet read it, or haven’t read it in a while, you’ll be surprised at how well it holds up. The prose is lean and spare, completely stripped of ornamentation or affectation. It reads like the confession that it reveals itself to be. Cain, the son of a college president and professor who always corrected his grammar, claimed that his biggest literary influence was a bricklayer named Ike with whom he spent a lot of time as a kid. Cain had a good ear, and was captivated by the way that regular guys talked. At the age of forty, having been a reasonably successful journalist and editor, he moved to California, where he became an unsuccessful screenwriter. But there he had a lucky break: he discovered an entirely different kind of regular-guy speech, that of the “Western roughneck” who “has been to high school, completes his sentences, and uses reasonably good grammar.” Suddenly, Cain had found his voice, or at least the voice he wanted to use to tell his stories. There was never anything arch or artsy or self-consciously clever about it. It was oral, not floral. No one in Cain’s fiction is “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” (to quote Raymond Chandler’s memorable description of Moose Malloy from Farewell, My Lovely).
Then there was the “ragged right margin” he loved so much, another of his innovations. Long stretches of Postman are made up of nothing but dialogue, without the he said and she said. Cain got rid of most of the tedious, repetitive identifiers, figuring that if he did his job right, the reader would know who was talking. If it weren’t for Cain, we wouldn’t have had Elmore Leonard or Robert B. Parker.
Postman is the story of an unemployed drifter in southern California named Frank Chambers, who falls in love, or at least in lust, with Cora Papadakis, a ruthlessly ambitious Iowa girl married to the Greek American owner of a gas station/roadside diner. The two of them conspire to kill her husband and make it look like an accident.
The story launches you out of the silo from its famous opening line: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”
And then it accelerates from there.
The novel is barely a hundred pages long. Cain worked hard to distill it to its essence, pruning eighty thousand words until he ended up with a lean, taut manuscript of thirty-five thousand words. His publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, initially rejected it on the grounds that it was too short, pointing out that Cain’s contract stipulated a novel of at least forty thousand words. But that was only a pretext. The truth was that Mr. Knopf disliked what he called its “rough, impromptu style” and published it only after considerable arm-twisting by his wife, Blanche, and Cain’s mentor and friend, the journalist Walter Lippmann.
Cain was a flop in Hollywood, but his indentured servitude to the movie studios wasn’t wasted. It taught him pacing, momentum, and what he liked to call the “algebra” of story construction. (“Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right,” he once said. “Time is your only critic. If your algebra is right, if the progression is logical, but still surprising, it keeps.”)
A fellow screenwriter told him about a narrative technique called the “love rack.” This has never been satisfactorily defined, but it seems to refer to the dramatic situation in which a couple find themselves when they fall in love. One day Cain had a brainstorm: why not make the entire plot a “love rack”? What would happen if “a couple of jerks” discovered that a murder could be a love story, too, only to realize that two people can’t live with such a secret?
Inspired by the famous 1920s trial of a woman who convinced her corset-salesman boyfriend to murder her rich husband for the insurance money by making it look like the consequence of a burglary—and who then tried to kill the boyfriend—Postman was a huge, immediate best seller. It was also banned in Boston and in Canada, and was notorious for its steaminess, its kinky mixture of sex and violence. Even today, eight decades later, it’s strong stuff. When Frank first sees Cora, he observes that “she really wasn’t any ravaging beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” They kiss, and then “I sank my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth.” When the two of them are staging the scene to make it look like a car accident, Cora tells him to tear her blouse. “Rip me! Rip me!” she says.
I ripped her. I shoved my hand in her blouse and jerked. She was wide open, from her throat to her belly . . . I hauled off and hit her in the eye as hard as I could. She went down. She was right down there at my feet, her eyes shining, her breasts trembling, drawn up in tight points, and pointing right up at me.
We’re in the head of an amoral, homicidal loser, and we find ourselves actually
rooting for him to succeed. There are no sympathetic characters here. Everything rides on the propulsion, the momentum of the narrative, the elegant ironies of the ending.
The Postman Always Rings Twice inspired Albert Camus’s existential novel The Stranger. It gave birth to an entire genre: noir, both in fiction and in cinema, and inspired countless imitators. It’s one of only two crime thrillers on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels (Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is the other). But what’s most impressive is how, some eighty years later, James Cain’s lean, mean first novel still works. It still thrills; it still enthralls. He got the algebra right.
Joseph Finder is the New York Times best-selling author of ten novels, including Buried Secrets, the second novel to feature “private spy” Nick Heller; Killer Instinct, winner of the Thriller for Best Novel; and Paranoia, now in development as a major motion picture. His first novel, The Moscow Club, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best spy novels of all time. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, Joe did graduate work at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. He lives in Boston with his wife, their teenaged daughter, and a neurotic golden retriever. Visit him online at www.josephfinder.com.