The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

Начало книги

James M. Cain, Conceded by many writers and critics to be one of the most influential of America’s popular authors, is remembered primarily for his four controversial novels of the 1930s and ’40s — The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Serenade, and Mildred Pierce. However, Cain was essentially a writer of short fiction. This is confirmed when we recall that two of the above stories — Postman and Double Indemnity, which Ross Macdonald described as “a pair of American masterpieces — are really novellas, barely qualifying as full-length works of fiction. In fact, when Cain sent the manuscript of the story later published as The Postman Always Rings Twice to Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher maintained that at 35,000 words it was too short to qualify as a novel and refused, at first, to pay Cain the $500 advance called for under an option clause in an earlier contract. Double Indemnity, which has only 29,000 words, was first published as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine, and Serenade has only 44,000 words. Even Cain’s two biggest hardcover sellers — Past All Dishonor and The Butterfly — are slim little books, more accurately described as novellas. (The Butterfly hardly looks like a conventional novel, even with the twelve-page “preface” Cain added, in part, to give it additional heft in the bookstores.) His longest novel, The Moth, published in 1948, never achieved the impact or the sales of his earlier shorter books, and in a letter to a friend Cain offered one explanation for the book’s limited success: “If you ask me, a simple tale, told briefly, is what most people really like.”

Читать дальше →