Original book jacket for The Postman Always Rings Twice.Larger.
The dark side of the California dream has long attracted gamblers and grifters looking to enjoy El Dorado without doing much of the work. For Maryland native James M. Cain, that attitude often spelled trouble.
Though the card table is the classic trademark symbol of the winner-take-all west, in The Postman Always Rings Twice James M. Cain shows that the greed and deception that sometimes characterize the California con can be found just as easily at the pool table.
Then was when I really started to shoot. I made shots that Hoppe couldn't make. I banked them in the three cushions, I made billiard shots, I had my english working, so the ball just floated around the table, I even called a jump shot and made it. He never made a shot that Blind Tom the Sightless Piano Player couldn't have made. He miscued, he got himself all tangled up on position, he scratched, he put the one ball in the wrong pocket, he never even called a bank shot. And when I walked out of there, he had my $250 and a $3 watch that I had bought to keep track of when Cora might be driving in to the market. Oh, I was good all right. The only trouble was I wasn't quite good enough.
Not long after its publication in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice became a classic of California noir writing, helping to establish James M. Cain's reputation as one of the foremost writers of the genre.
First edition book jacket for Mildred Pierce. Larger
Despite our celebrated cultural diversity—-expressed, for example, in art, fashion, film, literature, and architecture—-like other Americans, Californians are also imprisoned by impersonal, mass-produced taste.
Noir writer James M. Cain's derisive view of mass-produced culture was expressed in his 1941 novel, Mildred Pierce, the story of a woman desperate to find an escape from her middle-class prison. Here, Mildred's husband enters their suburban, Glendale home.
The living room he stepped into corresponded to the lawn he left. It was indeed the standard living room sent out by department stores as suitable for a Spanish bungalow, and consisted of a crimson velvet coat of arms, displayed against the wall; crimson velvet drapes, hung on iron spears; a crimson rug, with figured border; a settee in front of the fireplace, flanked by two chairs, all of these having straight backs and beaded seats; a long oak table holding a lamp with stained glass shade; two floor lamps of iron, to match the overhead spears and having crimson silk shades; one table, in the corner, in the Grand Rapids style, and one radio, on this table, in the bakelite style. On the tinted walls, in addition to the coat of arms, were three paintings. . . . One might object that this living room achieved the remarkable feat of being cold and at the same time stuffy, and that it would be quite oppressive to live in. But the man was vaguely proud of it, especially the pictures, which he had convinced himself were "pretty good." As for living in it, it had never once occurred to him.
Cain's best known work, the 1934 crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice is darker than Mildred Pierce, but the latter's depiction of the trap of middle-class consumer culture is nearly as grim.
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