0 The Butterfly (1946)

By what I can glean from James M. Cain's 1946 preface, The Butterfly originated many years earlier as a story of a mostly indigent family from the Big Sandy River country of Appalachia who heads out for a better life in California. Cain abandoned it when he caught wind of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and subsequently ransacked the manuscript for scenes and passages of other novels. But it's not at all like Steinbeck's novel, not least because the central animating plot point is a complicated story of adultery and incest, and not much of anything to do with the noble dignity of poverty. It trucks in broad stereotypes, often cutting over to the lurid chiefly because it can, and thus the only interest it holds is in wondering how far it will go. It's a rush job potboiler in its final, brief form (barely 100 pages), with a lot of complications intended to demarcate the innocent and corrupt in programmatic fashion, which results in everyone being corrupt, though not necessarily by the terms of the story, which is just annoying. All the never-ending mysteries set up here could be resolved credibly, quickly, and without drama by a few judicious DNA tests. I was frankly shocked by the snide way Cain unfailingly assumes his own superiority to the rubes and hayseeds he condescends to put through predictable paces. Corn liquor in fruit jars, grotesque ignorance, depraved behavior, and pride. Guns, humiliations. He probably has many details about the lives of his characters right—as he firmly asserts in the preface. But he clearly never quite sees them as human. One wonders what might have happened if he'd never heard of the Steinbeck book and finished. It's possible there's a good story in this group of characters, though less easy to see how it works as a James M. Cain novel. He seems most effective to me with more money around the place—in insurance companies, opera, suburban Southern California. The Postman Always Rings Twice shows that he could write about poverty convincingly. But he'd have had to get a lot more delicate in The Butterfly a lot quicker, in areas such as incest, and he'd have had to find ways to make it more believable. Two tall orders there.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Butterfly (1946)

0 Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)

I don't think you can count this as one of the best by James M. Cain, which makes me wonder how precipitously the quality falls off after his three best-known novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce). Even this one got made into a movie too (Slightly Scarlet, 1956) so conceivably it is still better than many others. It frequently put me in mind of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest. Both are focused on changes of corrupting power in mid-sized or small cities, engineered by one or two clever enterprising fellows (and dames), the chief enterpriser also doing the first-person narrative honors. So we see and hear from such principals as the mayor, district attorney, chief of police, and boss crime lord. Excuse me for yawning. I don't see many productive directions for fiction about political corruption to go, All the King's Men notwithstanding. If it turns out the bad guys win it's cynical and also not a surprise; if the good guys take it it's not believable. Better all around to go the factual route, because the old cliché holds true: you can't make up the best stuff. Given that it is Cain in 1942, there's a certain amount of quality here in spite of everything (including that I would be surprised if he looked at this manuscript more than twice, and not at all surprised if it were only once). Dialogue and exposition are clipped and propulsive, also lots of people are strangely familiar with opera. There's a love story at the center but Cain is unable for once to make it sick enough to be interesting, so it tends to just lay there and quiver any time it's rotated up front. There's lots of action, lots of narrative sequence, but not much in the way of stakes, just low-level hoodlum types getting over on their higher-level superiors, extending all the way up to the mayor's office—two mayor's offices, actually, because of course there's also an obvious element of irony here about the everlasting fungibility of political corruption. There are biographies and history books packed full of stories much better than this. For better or worse, however, few will tell them as well as Cain does, so you can take that into account too.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)

0 Serenade (1937)

James M. Cain's Serenade was written right after The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and it definitely has a lot of their brisk, hard-boiled forward momentum. And despite its many strange elements it is still, more than anything, a crime novel in a decided noir style, recognizably Cain. Yet it is ultimately served well by the strange elements: an Aztec-Mexican prostitute, a shrewd and talented American opera singer, and various lurid mid-century details of drunkenness and debauchery, notably a crazed power-mad homosexual stereotype who arrives late. At which point it heads off directly into the macabre and the caricatured with just about enough unholy zeal to get it across the finish line. Until then, and after a brief prologue in a purple Mexico, it tends to be most interesting when it is about the career of the opera singer, John Sharp, who is on the comeback trail. Sharp talks and behaves more like an automaton, as he wheels and deals with figures of great power in the entertainment / culture industries of the '30s in Hollywood and New York, which is frankly weird. But if the tone is slightly jarring, the details are always interesting, based on Cain's own keen appreciation for the world of opera. The whole thing is way overheated from start to finish, larded up with arguably too many caricatures. But I thought it was remarkably sensitive to Juana, the Aztec-Mexican prostitute, who plays hard against expectations and has a lot of complexity behind her accent, frequently observing that things seem "fonny." Serenade goes over the top at its climax, in a scene that very much surprised me, and clarified the love relationship between the principals. I guess it might suffer overall in some of its extremes when you reflect on it, but the inflamed language and incident pretty much had me all the way. I also liked and was surprised by some of the ways Cain treats homosexuality here, though of course it had to be explicitly licensed by the theatrical opera settings. In the '30s, evidently, everyone understands that's where you find "them," and "they" are all here: transvestites, lesbians, and gays, oh my. But behind that a remarkable clarity sometimes peers out, which I like about Serenade quite a bit. "There's nothing to tell," Sharp says when he is finally confessing his gay affair of years earlier to Juana. "Every man has got five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out, and I did, that's all."

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Serenade (1937)