Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.1.3 James M. Cain
James M. Cain (1892-1977) reveals that he never felt that he belonged to a
particular school or tradition:
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 logo of the
American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little
effort. (Preface to Double Indemnity in Cain 1989b:1)
This “vividness of speech” is one of the characteristics of Cain’s writing style. Just
like Hammett or Chandler, he writes about crime in a stylistically self-conscious manner,
creating characters who use a strong vernacular mode, who are very often self-destructive
or used and betrayed by strong women. The threat of the femme fatale is one of the basic
formulas pervading his work, with sexually enticing women who are embodiments of male
sexual fantasies, and in meeting them and beginning affairs with them these men enact
what Cain has called “the wish come true”.
It is not too difficult to understand why Chandler disliked Cain’s sour and mordant
writing: “James Cain- faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every
kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece
of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not
because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.” This note was
written – unfairly, in my opinion - by Raymond Chandler to his publisher. Curiously
enough, Chandler would, a few years later along with its director Billy Wilder, be
responsible for the screenplay of Double Indemnity, from Cain’s novel.
The way Cain’s characters move about in his novels, in a highly sexual and
psychologically explosive manner, shows an original approach to his characters, through
their own words, from the point of view of those who committed the crimes (very often the
narrators themselves were the criminals), rather than being observed by a moralistic and
sexually restrained investigator, for example. His protagonists are often victims of the
Depression, people who due to adverse circumstances were forced to leave their
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