At 42, James M Cain left it relatively late to publish his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) but, as he told the Paris Review’s David Zinsser in 1977, “Actually, the strange thing is that novels aren’t written by young guys … You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.”
The story of lovers who conspire to commit violence to get what they want, The Postman Always Rings Twice is pure noir, a “six-minute egg”, in the words of the New York Times. Cain, however, took exception to people describing his work as hard-boiled. “Let’s talk about this so-called style,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re talking about – ‘tough’, ‘hard-boiled’. I tried to write as people talk.”
Given that The Postman has been adapted for film six times and Billy Wilder made a movie from another Cain novel, Double Indemnity, perhaps the most surprising thing about the Maryland-born author was his attitude to the movies: “I don’t go … I just don’t like movies. People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”
US novelist Steve Erickson has described Cain as “a major figure of American fiction’s shadow pantheon”; Albert Camus, the French writer and 1957 Nobel laureate, would have not hesitated to promote him to the front rank. Instead of being anti-American, like many French leftwing intellectuals, Camus was open about using Cain’s debut as a model for The Outsider (1942). In 1946, Camus made his only visit to the US. “If it had not actually taken place,” wrote Herbert R Lottman in Albert Camus in New York, “when writing a biography of Albert Camus, I should have been tempted to invent his visit to my birthplace city.” The paraphrasing of Voltaire might appear to confer godlike status on Camus, but it was the Frenchman who was in awe of New York. Giving a lecture at Columbia University, he was dismayed to hear that the evening’s receipts, to be given to charity, had been stolen. When his audience volunteered to make up the difference, Camus was deeply impressed.
Long-distance book-signing
Another author who inspires fanatical devotion is Margaret Atwood. But how many of her readers know she’s not only a multi-award-winning author of feminist-dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), but also the co-founder of a technology company, Unotchit Inc? In the US in 2006, at four in the morning, having just flown back from a book tour in Japan to do an event on the US west coast, followed by Denver, with Salt Lake City and Boston to come later that day, Atwood came up with the idea for a remote book-signing device, the LongPen, that would allow her to sign autographs anywhere in the world from the comfort of her study.
“You’re talking to the person who was heading for Los Angeles when they had that earthquake,” Atwood told a reporter, “was heading for New York on the morning of 9/11, and set out to do a book tour in Japan when the Sars episode hit.” Yep, she’d sure had enough of doing book tours.
But would the LongPen take off? Her UK publisher was touchingly optimistic. “This creates the possibility of an entirely new book promotion event that will inject new life into the marketing of books and authors’ relationship with their readers,” said Nigel Newton.
That Atwood has just been touring the UK to promote her new novel is a sign either of the LongPen’s not having taken off, after all, or of its inventor’s acceptance that readers prefer the personal touch. But Atwood remains a director of Syngrafii, the new name for Unotchit Inc, which now creates business products.
Cat lover and mollusc breeder
It’s hard to imagine the late American crime writer Patricia Highsmith having any truck with the demands publishers make of their authors today. Her Little Tales of Misogyny (1974) led some critics to accuse her of hating women, but in truth she didn’t discriminate.
Like Cain, Highsmith wrote from the point of view of the doers rather than the done-to, having little sympathy for the victims. The Ripley novels reveal her pitiless observation of human nature; screen adaptations of her work, including Strangers on a Train, the first three Ripley novels and others, pull back from the most deplorable motivation, the cruellest plot twist. Highsmith preferred animals, cats in particular, and – wait for it – snails. A mollusc breeder, she would attend parties with snails in her handbag.
It’s even said that Highsmith travelled with a snail under each breast, which might partly explain why she had no relationships longer than a few years. If she had faults, insecurity was hardly one of them. The same could not be said of her contemporary Truman Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, one of the biggest-selling true crime books of all time. His recurring nightmare was to find himself on stage not knowing his lines. Why he turned down an invitation from the Krays to write their biography is unknown, but perhaps venturing out of his comfort zone had something to do with it. He may have felt a fish out of water touring with the Rolling Stones, after Rolling Stone magazine hired him to cover their Exile on Main St tour and he failed to file. He was keen to push the “non-fiction novel” label that was used to describe In Cold Blood and was disappointed when it didn’t win the Pulitzer prize.
In many ways, his story is more tragic than that of Highsmith, who died alone in hospital, her last visitor her accountant. With the success of In Cold Blood, Capote abandoned his Brooklyn Heights apartment and everything in it, including an unfinished first novel, Summer Crossing, which predated his other unfinished first novel, Answered Prayers. His last years were spent appearing on chat shows and playing himself in a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. He even carried a security blanket around with him into adulthood; reportedly it was with him the day he died.
Nicholas Royle is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and the award-winning author of seven novels and more than 100 short stories. The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Outsider, In Cold Blood and a boxed set of The Ripley Novels are all available to buy as handsome Christmas gifts in illustrated hardback editions from www.foliosociety.com
