Paul Cain (1) (1902–1966)

Paul Cain is a bit of an enigma, a terrific writer who published only one novel and some short stories before pretty much disappearing from print and from history. (At least, easily uncovered history.) His one novel, FAST ONE, is as hardboiled as anything I've ever read. It reminds me a good deal of Dashiell Hammett's classic RED HARVEST, inasmuch as it has a central figure pitting various groups of nasty folk against each other. The one drawback I have with the book is that the plethora of characters are not well separated one from another, descriptively, and I had a hard time keeping them separate in my mind. Only reaching midway through the book could I picture an individual whenever I saw a character's name. This quibble aside, FAST ONE is a dark and dirty crime novel with great writing and a compelling story.… (mehr)

Fast One by Paul Cain is a very dark and violent gangster story. It has become known as the “most hard-boiled novel of the 1930s and for the mystery surrounding the actual identity of the author. Paul Cain’s real name was allegedly George Carrol Sims, he worked in Hollywood as a screen writer under the name of Peter Ruric. He was notoriously closed mouth about his origins.

As for the book, I was not a fan. I found the story rather choppy and the writing was nowhere near the level of his contemporaries like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The main character in this story, Gerry Kells has apparently decided that he should be the kingpin of the gangster world in L. A. The plot is full of double-crosses, guns and fists, loose women and gambling money. This story moves quickly, but mostly from one scene of violence to another. There is very little character development, just one complication after another for Kells. In fact, it was often difficult to distinguish one character from another as they tended to all sound the same.

While Fast One has a place in history as a key work in the development of the hard-boiled crime novel, I personally require more finesse in the plotting, more development of the characters, and a little more subtlety in my action scenes.… (mehr)

Today Paul Cain is remembered for his lone novel Fast One, which--more than a decade after its publication--served as a model for the burgeoning subgenre of noir (and for which Raymond Chandler expressed a cockeyed admiration). It was a monochromatic book, filled with characters whose almost doltish insistence on getting themselves killed made it impossible for me to take seriously, but Fast One was not entirely representative of Cain's work. It sounds good to be dubbed "ultra-hardboiled" or "the hardest of the hardboiled," but at bottom that's a puerile distinction...and, as far as Cain is concerned, an imprecise one. In these stories he happily made use of all the stereotypical variants of the '30s pulp detective, from the independently wealthy eccentric who solves crimes as a lark to the screwy reporter who works hand in hand with the PI or the cops. In this way, Cain bore a much closer resemblance to his peers than all the breathlessly smitten reviewers of his novel would have you believe.

The stories vary in quality: a bleak vignette called "Parlor Trick" is reminiscent of Fast One, while "Murder in Blue" (the tale of an amiable Hollywood stuntman turned detective/bodyguard/con artist who gets in way over his head) is enlivened by touches of whimsy and even human warmth. My favorite is "One, Two, Three," a fun murder caper in which Cain managed to find humor in one of his recurring themes, that of the beautiful but treacherous woman. Seven Slayers doesn't include his best story, "Trouble Chaser," but you can find that one in Pronzini & Adrian's Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories.

Like everyone who followed in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett (until Raymond Chandler, whose psychologically mature writing initiated a sea change in the genre), Paul Cain was trying to outdo Hammett's slick and seemingly effortless minimalism. He didn't succeed--he wasn't a good enough writer for that--but he had his moments.… (mehr)