James M. Cain

American · 1892 to 1977

Born James Mallahan Cain on July 1, 1892, in Annapolis, Maryland, to James William Cain, a professor at St John's College who later became president of Washington College, and Rose Mallahan, a coloratura soprano who had given up the opera stage to marry, Cain grew up in a household of impeccable grammar and constant reading. He was a precocious child, skipped two grades, and took his degree at Washington College a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday. His mother killed his early dream of singing opera with a single sentence: you have no voice, no looks, no stage personality. He drifted through clerk and inspector jobs, then found newspapers, working for the Baltimore Sun under H. L. Mencken, who became a friend and editor. Mencken brought him to The American Mercury in 1924, and a 1928 short story called Pastorale taught Cain the first-person criminal voice that would make him famous. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), written in eight months in Hollywood, is the foundational novel of American noir, the lover and the wife conspiring to kill the husband, told in the doomed inarticulate voice of the drifter who pulls it off. Double Indemnity (1936), Serenade (1937), and Mildred Pierce (1941) followed, all of them filmed. He hated Hollywood, never sold a screenplay, and lived in Hyattsville, Maryland, for the last thirty years of his life. He was made one of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Masters in 1970. He continued to publish into his eighties and was working on The Cocktail Waitress when he died on October 27, 1977, in Hyattsville, at the age of eighty-five.