The Best American Noir of the Century

James M(allahan) Cain (1892-1977) was born in Annapolis, and grew up in Maryland, returning to the state permanently (after seventeen years as a screenwriter in California) in 1947. He received his BA from Washington College at the age of eighteen, then taught mathematics and English for four years before receiving his MA. He became a journalist, also submitting articles and stories to magazines while still in his twenties. His first full-length novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), became a huge bestseller and was filmed by MGM (with a script by Raymond Chandler) in 1946, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, and again in 1981, with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. Cain did not write detective stories, but is lumped with other hard-boiled writers for his tough, gritty crime novels of sex and violence, most of which follow a familiar plot of a man falling for a woman and engaging in a criminal plot for her, only to have her betray him. In addition to Postman, the formula also worked in Double Indemnity (1943), filmed by Billy Wilder in 1944 with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The other classic film noir made from his work, Mildred Pierce (1941), was as bleak as his other books and films, but this time it is the titular character who is betrayed by a woman — her daughter.

“Pastorale” is Cain’s first published story and established the template for what was to become his more serious work. The familiar story of a man and woman in an illicit affair planning to murder her husband is told in the humorous style of Ring Lardner’s “Haircut,” but nonetheless leads to inevitable darkness. It was first published in the March 1928 issue of American Mercury and first collected in book form in Cain’s The Baby in the Icebox (1981).

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Well, it looks like Burbie is going to get hung. And if he does; what he can lay it on is, he always figured he was so damn smart. You see, Burbie, he left town when he was about sixteen year old. He run away with one of them traveling shows, “East Lynne” I think it was, and he stayed away about ten years. And when he come back he thought he knowed a lot. Burbie, he’s got them watery blue eyes what kind of stick out from his face, and how he killed the time was to sit around and listen to the boys talk down at the poolroom or over at the barber shop or a couple other places where he hung out, and then wink at you like they was all making a fool of theirself or something and nobody didn’t know it but him.