Andrew McAleer is the author of 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists and co-editor, with Gay Toltl Kinman, of the mystery anthology Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. He recently completed a volume of short mystery stories featuring his father John McAleer’s Golden Age detective, Henry von Stray, and he’s now at work, with Gay Toltl Kinman, on two mystery anthologies: Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (Level Best Books) and Agatha & Derringer Get Cozy (Down & Out Books).  Andrew has contributed two previous posts to this site (one on a poem by Edward D. Hoch, the other about Rex Stout); this time he shares selections from his father’s interviews with James M. Cain.  —Janet Hutchings

Some time in the early 1970s, not long after Rex Stout authorized my father, John McAleer to write his biography, another major American writer in the field of crime literature asked my father if he would also write his biography. My father readily agreed. After all, this was James M. Cain asking—and the truth is: the postman don’t always ring twice. Hence, while putting the finishing touches on Rex Stout: A Biography, my father seized every available opportunity to interview Cain on his life, craft, and peers. The Cain biography, however, never came to be.

With the completion of Stout, my father was ready to take on Cain full time when a letter arrived from fellow biographer Roy Hoopes. Hoopes expressed concern that he’d heard my father was writing Cain’s biography because Cain commissioned him as well. As my father later wrote, “To spare Cain his blushes I yielded ground to Hoopes . . .” As a result, my father’s interviews and Cain correspondence were filed away and remained so for a quarter century.

While assisting my father with some research in or around 2001, I happened upon the Cain file and helped him compile the “lost” gems into manuscript form. These remarkable interviews were published under the title: Packed and Loaded: Conversations with James M. Cain. (Nimble Books, 2010) In addition to an Afterword by Shamus winner Jeremiah Healy, I obtained original epigraphs about Cain from Elmore Leonard, Sue Grafton, Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane, Peter Lovesey, Phil Lovesey, Edward D. Hoch, Katherine Hall Page, Robin Moore, and William G. Tapply. The interviews are as impressive and important to crime fiction as the foregoing list of authors. 

As my father tells it in his Foreword to Packed and Loaded, 

These reflections reveal Cain as he wanted to be remembered.  There never was a time when Cain was not forthright in utterance, but in his octogenarian interviews age sanctioned an awareness remote from the restraints wariness might have imposed on a lesser mortal, a decade earlier.  At eighty-five he dared to give free expression to an estimate of his fellow man with an integrity, which even those less engaged in reality would scorn to rebuke.

In this critical, tell-it-like-it-is study, Cain reveals his thoughts on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Hammett, Chandler, Marilyn Monroe, and in his eighty-fifth year, his plans for the future. (Cain died on October 27, 1977–two years to the day after Rex Stout.)

The following selected Q&A and epigraph’s from Packed & Loaded make their first online appearance anywhere exclusively for EQMM’s “Something is Going to Happen” followers.

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McAleer:  Do you write more than one draft when writing a book?

Cain:  I rewrite so much I lose track of how many drafts it takes to finish a book.  At least four or five—sometimes more.  I’ve cut down the number in recent years by outlining, not only of story, but of characters, etc., before I start the text.  This sidesteps a lot of false starts I used to make.

James M. Cain’s novels were my introduction to noir fiction.  There have been many writers since with a flair for the Dark Side of human nature, but none with the same deft touch.  —Sue Grafton

McAleer:  Do you think that your experience as a journalist helped you with writing fiction?

JMC:  I don’t think it helped much.  I don’t think they have much relationship. . . . In my novels, I don’t write the way I write for a newspaper at all. . . . To write a novel, I have to pretend to be somebody else.  I have to be, pretend to be, the character telling his story.

McAleer:  Some of your novels are in the third person, however.

JMC:  I wrote three books in the third person:  Mildred Pierce, Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, and The Magician’s Wife.  And, it tells a story, I seem to be able to get away with it but not with any such impact and conviction and circumstantial background, as I get when I have the character tell the story. . . . In the first person it seemed as though it really happened. . . . In the third person, I don’t care how good you are, or even if you’re Sinclair Lewis, there come times when it seems as though you’re making it up as you go along.  To that extent, first-personal narration must be respected.

What I gained from reading Cain is an appreciation of the antagonist’s point of view:  that bad guys are more fun to write about than good guys, their attitude and they way they talk always more entertaining. —Elmore Leonard

McAleer: Do you think the reading audience has changed much?  When I read Serenade and The Postman Always Rings Twice, the narrators were characters who were very American and had definite ethnic prejudices.  Do you think today’s readers might be too sensitive about such a narrator?

JMC:  I don’t think so, because it doesn’t say that I have any ethnic prejudice, it says the character does.  I think in this personal book [The Postman Always Rings Twice] he kept talking about the Greek, as though, “How could you marry this Greek?”  He asked her as though a Greek wasn’t much to be married to. . . . And he knew that she was kind of sensitive about it, but if she was sensitive about it she was ethnically prejudiced, and so was he.  But it seemed to me that the reader would simply accept that’s how they were and not particularly think I had to be—or assume that I had no right to mention it.

McAleer:  Do some episodes in your books please you or stand out more than others?

JMC:  Once the book is written, I never think about the goddamn book anymore.  I get on with the next book.

McAleer:  When you’re writing do you consciously set limits on what a writer should say or could say in a book?

JMC:  That has no meaning for me.  I don’t set any limits.  I never heard of a writer that sets limits on what a writer can say.

In many ways James M. Cain set the standard for pacing, tightness of plot, and psychological suspense.  The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Butterfly, Double Indemnity—to name just a few of his novels—rank foremost in the field of crime literature.   —Robin Moore

McAleer:  How would you rank Hammet and Chandler as hard-boiled authors?

JMC:  I’ve been accused of writing like Hammet.  But I never read anything by Hammet . . . I got a copy of The Glass Key and I would pick it up and try to read it . . . But by the end of four or five weeks I’d only read twenty pages of this book.  I think to myself, “For Christ’s sake, you can’t like it too well.”  And I met him one time, over at the Edward G. Robinson’s.  This somewhat wild-looking character with white hair he had, came charging up to shake my hand, and tell me how much he admired my writing and so on.  Said he was Dash Hammett.  And I wrung his hand, and I said what an honor it was, how glad I was to know him.  And then I got away from this guy but quick, ’cause I had not read anything by him . . . I’ve never read one word of Chandler . . . I used to run into him at parties:  “Why hello, how’ve you been?”  But outside of that. . .this one afternoon when Billy Wilder had me over to talk about this Double Indemnity thing that he was working on at the time.  I had no discussions with Chandler at all.  I scarcely knew him.

James M. Cain was a master of less is more.  Reading him is a pleasure; re-reading is sheer joy.   —Katherine Hall Page

McAleer:  You don’t think F. Scott Fitzgerald was good at evoking character development through dialogue.  Who do you think was good?

JMC:  I’ll tell you who’s good:  Arthur Miller, Sinclair Lewis.  Arthur Miller was a genius at it.  He was the one married to Marilyn Monroe. . . . Marilyn was what’s called a triangle girl.  They’re girls that lived in that triangle between Hollywood Boulevard, Highland Avenue, Sunset.  Makes a triangle.  The Hollywood Bowl goes off one angle—Pepper Tree Lane they call it.  It’s off the Highland angle of this triangle.  The Hollywood bowl Lane of maybe two to three hundred yards of trees and at the end of the Lane is the Hollywood Bowl that’s off the triangle.  But in this triangle a dozen apartment houses of one and two room apartments lived girls like Marilyn.  They have one nice dress and one pretty good dress.  They’re known as party girls . . . They had a way of talking.  That peculiar lingo; it’s different from anything I’ve ever heard.  I’ve heard it a few times, after all, you live in Hollywood you meet some triangle girls at the party. 

Cain made it seem easy, but only if you’ve tried it yourself do you realize how difficult it is to master the genre as skillfully as he did. —Edward D. Hoch

McAleer:  What book do you think is your best work?

Cain:  My best book is the one which sold the most copies, so far as I’m concerned, and by that test, my Postman leads the list, with so many editions I’ve completely lost track.  I’m quite vain of the fact that it’s still in print, and still making me a living.

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We remain deeply indebted to James M. Cain’s original and historical contributions to literature. As historian Robin W. Winks reminds in his Edgar Award-winning, Mystery & Suspense Writers: the Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, “The birth of crime noir can be traced to the 1930s and grew out of the Great Depression . . . In many ways James M. Cain’s work serves to define crime noir writing and represents the form at its most typical.”  (PP. 1012-1013)

More than 20 years have passed since I worked on Packed & Loaded with my father. Fond memories. I sometimes wonder what would have become of these historical documents if I didn’t happen to pull open that file drawer at that particular moment in history while my father was still around to discuss them. It’s best not to worry about such things and just be thankful the postman rang twice.