The Complete Slayers: Fast One and the Complete Short Stories of Paul Cain

by Paul Cain, Max Allan Collins (Editor), Lynn Myers (Editor)

This collection features the novel Fast One and the complete short fiction written by Paul Cain for Black Mask and other pulps. This is the first time that many of them have been collected in book format. Lynn Myers and Max Alan Collins have written an outstanding introduction with new research into Cain's life.

Genres: Crime

622 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 2011

About the author

Paul Cain was the pen name of George Caryl Sims (1902–1966), a pulp fiction author and screenwriter. His sole novel, Fast One (1932), is considered a landmark of the hardboiled style.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this at a Centipede Press who did a fantastic job of presenting it. It has pages of color photos of the old Black Mask pulp covers & quite a few others, usually 4 to a page, although there is at least one full page one, plus B&W drawings. An awesome presentation of a mostly forgotten, but highly talented writer - among other things. Cain's bio, what is know of it under his various names (not pseudonyms, but he actually changed his name) is sketchy.

The editors, including Max Allan Collins, did a great job of pulling together all of these stories before they were completely lost. Apparently that was a very tough job. One, "The Tasting Machine" was an early example of bizzaro fiction, very much at odds with all the other stories which were hard boiled detective or criminal.

Cain is very, very terse, often barely sketching the characters & action in his plot driven tales, yet that whirls about in maddening twists & turns. His characters all tend to be amoral, at best. They drink like fish, drug, gamble, & shoot each other down in such numbers that it's hard to keep track, especially since there are entire scene changes occasionally from one paragraph to the next. You can't skim this prose or you'll get lost.

Some elements are very dated & even hackneyed. Many of the stories rise to a crescendo of violence & that makes little sense until the 'hero' explains it all to us in the last page or so. That happened a bit too often. While he did create one of the first female detectives, most of his ladies were supporting characters, damsels in distress or femme fatales. It was definitely a white man's world, although there wasn't a lot of bad racial prejudice.

Overall, it was a fantastic read & a must for any noir detective or hard case buff. Each story is introduced by another hard boiled author & their insight is wonderful, although they all agree that Cain wrote some of the toughest, meanest characters around. His only novel "The Fast One" is included in this as the original 5 short stories. I think I would have preferred to start with it. Great stuff.

[Michael Moe · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to hardboiled fiction, Paul Cain was about as hard as it gets. Lean and mean prose and fast-moving plots. His later pieces displayed a looser style and injected a dry, urbane (although somewhat risqué) humor and wit. It would have been interesting to see where he went if he had kept writing. Maybe he wasn't quite on the same level as his contemporaries Hammett and Chandler, but he wasn't far behind and deserves to be better known. Paul Cain himself has been something of a mystery for decades--little has been known about him and much of what was known has proved to be a fiction manufactured by the man himself. So this collection of the complete works of Cain is almost as interesting for the recently unearthed biographical material as for the stories and novel it contains.