Friday, July 16, 2010
cain mutiny
Raymond Chandler wrote his publisher Alfred Knopf in February 1943:
“I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.” – Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler
both chandler and cain had films made based on their novels. i surely place chandler at the top as a writer but cain's novel 'double indemnity' was a flipping masterpiece of cinema.
image: cool painting of chandler
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