The Paul Cain Omnibus: Every Crime Story and the Novel Fast One as Originally Published

by Paul Cain

Fifteen stories and one novel—hard-boiled classics by an undisputed master
Following gangsters, blackmailers, and gunmen through the underbelly of 1930s America on their journeys to do dark deeds, Paul Cain’s stories are classics of his genre. The protagonists of ambiguous morality who populate Cain’s work are portrayed with a cinematic flair for the grim hardness of their world. Fast One , Cain’s only novel, was originally serialized in Black Mask in the 1930s. It introduces us to Gerry Kells, a hard-nosed criminal who still holds fast to his humanity in a Los Angeles that’s crooked to the core.
This collection presents Cain’s classic crime writing to a contemporary audience.

This ebook features an introduction by Boris Dralyuk.

Genres: Short Stories, Noir, Mystery, Hard Boiled, Fiction, Anthologies

472 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 17, 2013

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

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Paul Cain's stories in Black Mask Magazine. Cain was a pretty good pulp writer, but he always thought he was too good for the field. A number of Black Mask writers felt the same way.

These are hard boiled stories told through the lens of an impressionist painting. Fast and bare, without clear details of anything.

Very good stories, a bit different than the usual fare.

[AC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Cain came to Black Mask with this debut manuscript in 1932, just after Hammett had left it for Knopf (1928-1929). Joseph Shaw needed someone to replace him. And Cain became it. And his first submission, Fast One, stunned.

I had been under the impression that Fast One was rather a second-rate, and somewhat mannered and artificial hard-boiled crime novel that was excessive and over-the-top. A sort of early Mickey Spillane. And so I moved it from the top of the TBR pile to the bottom. For a while. Then I took the plunge on a whim, and saw this: “Kells drove up Fourth to the top of the hill. His eyes were half closed and there was an almost tender expression on his face. He swore softly, continuously, obscenely.”

And so it went and went. And I realized that this was not a second rate, over-the-top imitation, but rather the culmination of a style. It is, admittedly, slightly self-conscious and thus is a form of Mannerism. But having reached the peak, it looks over the top and into the abyss, and hurls itself with abandon into an entirely new space, and powerfully so. Kells flies without a net…, or at least he tries…

This is a great book, a must read…, for those in the genre. For me, it was 6+ read (in my inflationary rating system).

Here is what Keith Alan Deutsch, Afterword, wrote:
“Fast One is one of the first American novels in which the anti-hero exists on the edge of annihilation merely for the gamble and joy of living to the fullest in the present moment while all around him lesser characters lead lives of desperate greed and corrupt plotting. Though Cain’s novel has no moral center, and though all its characters are flawed, Cain’s anti-hero Kells is never greedy for personal, material gain, or for political power.

“What the Black Mask crime story tradition had already established in American writing when Cain debuted with the first installment of Fast One was the violently corrupted urban landscape of major American cities under siege from many different outlaw forces of political and commercial crime.

“What Cain brought to this tradition with Fast One and his other Black Mask tales, was a varied array of heroes and anti-heroes from hard-boiled detectives, stunt-men, and Hollywood studio trouble-shooters to grifters, goniffs, reporters, and even to an elegant retired judge who all exhibited a kind of amoral gambler’s grace in the face of the constant threat of moral and physical annihilation.”

And Boris Dralyuk:
“The first significant anti-heroes in American detective fiction…, Cain captured, for the first time, an amoral attitude that is now so pervasive it is almost invisible.”

That said, Paul Cain’s Fast One closely follows the basic pulp formula as set out by Michael Moorcock: “Model: the basic plot on the Maltese Falcon (or the Holy Grail — the Quest theme, basically). In the Falcon, a lot of people are after the same thing, the Black Bird. In the Mort D’Arthur, again a lot of people are after the same thing, the Holy Grail. It’s the same formula for westerns, too. Everyone’s after the same thing. The gold of El Dorado. Whatever.”

* The formula depends on the sense of a man being up against a superhuman force — politics, Big Business, supernatural evil, &c. The hero is fallible, and doesn’t want to be mixed up with these forces. He’s always about to walk out when something grabs him and involves him on a personal level.

See Michael Moorcock, "How to Write a Book in Three Days" (fin): www.ghostwoods.com/2010/05/how-to-wri...

As to Cain:
‘Paul Cain’ (George Caryl Sims) was a brilliant little (5’ 8”) young man from Iowa who had gone West to make his fortune. Early on, already a deep alcoholic with a flare for pseudonyms and false identities, not only print, but in real life, he was full of lies and ability who flashed momentarily onto the big stage of life with his stunning and brilliant debut publication, Fast One (1932). He wrote some two dozen additional, very competent (and some much *more* than just competent) stories for Black Mask and then, when Joseph Shaw departed, Cain (Sims) could never find his footing again. He flopped in Hollywood; he flopped with marriages; he stop writing (‘hardboilded’ went out of fashion…); he drank. Everyone who got to know him in later life came to hate him. He was a pretentious liar. Sinclair Lewis tried to help him, but eventually grew tired of him. Duhamel tried to help him, including Fast One in the Série Noire in 1944, and then found the man himself intolerable and tried to get rid of him by sending him to Spain. Cain then found love there, late in life, with a young woman who bore him two children. But he himself was too far gone by then to make it work. His life was a failure, leaving behind just that one stunning achievement. A sad tale. See the fascinating biography in this Omnibus edition, also printed (gratis) here, by Boris Dralyuk (who appears to be something of a prodigy): https://blackmaskmagazine.com/blog/pa...

I also read a handful of Cain’s stories (in addition to the novel), and the following were fantastic:

Paul Cain, “One, Two, Three” (1933) [5.5]. [Fine, well-structured & self-contained Black Mask style, hard-boiled short story. In the Continental Op mode. Excellent set piece; not thrilling, but good for teaching.]

Paul Cain, “Trouble Chaser” (1934) [5.5]. [Outstanding in the break, if a bit too pat in the stretch]

Paul Cain, “Sockdolager” (1936) [5.5]. [Top-notch & hardboiled; technically, near perfection…, which is its principal flaw. *Note: Dictionary defines ‘Sockdolager’ as “That which ends or settles a matter, as a decisive blow.”]

[cool breeze · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Paul Cain’s Fast One several years ago and was hugely impressed. It is the ultimate hard-boiled novel. I picked up this collection to read the rest of his work, which is not extensive. Most of the short stories are from Black Mask magazine and are similar to Fast One, but not quite as good, 3.5 to 4 stars. There are two exceptions. Pigeon’s Blood features a retired judge as the hero instead of the usual tough guy. The Tasting Machine was written not for Black Mask but for Gourmet Magazine! It quite good, but has a very different feel to it, somehow reminding me of Alexandre Dumas.

[Chuck Barksdale · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Aw, nuts. Let’s stop this goddamned foolishness and do some business.” Rose sat down, found a paper of matches and lighted his limp cigarette. “You’re supposed to be a good friend of Rainey’s. Whether you are or not is none of my business. The point is that everyone thinks you are, and if you show on the boat once in a while, it will look like everything is under control, like Rainey and I have a deal; see.” – from Fast One.

Although Paul Cain’s novel Fast One and his short story collection, Seven Slayers, have generally remained available, a book that includes his novel and all of his stories is now available in this collection. (His movie writing as Peter Ruric is not included of course.) Most of the stories and the novel were written 1932 through 1936 with almost all of them being published in Black Mask magazine. Although I had heard of Paul Cain, I had never read any of his books and was really looking forward to reading these stories. Unfortunately, the stories were a disappointment to me as they all (except one) seemed the same with bad guys beating up or killing other bad guys with mostly drunk women thrown in. Cain doesn’t spend much time on character and what people he has are not ones I would like in any event. I guess I wouldn’t have enjoyed living during prohibition (which apparently according to Cain led to crime and more drinking.)

The last story in the collection, “The Tasting Machine” is not like the others and was originally published in Gourmet Magazine in 1949. This one seems more like a science fiction piece with a machine that makes food. I read a lot of science fiction in my early years and this one was not one I’m sorry I missed back then.

I did like the novel Fast One more than the stories as at least I did get to learn a little bit about the main character, Gerry Kells. (See above quotation.) However, similar to the stories, Kells is always around bad guys and people keep dying. (They are all bad guys so that’s not all right I guess…) He has a woman who he doesn’t always trust and who is often drunk but in the end she’s no different than the women in his stories. Fast One was actually serialized in five parts in 1932 in Black Mask so it is one of his earliest works.

I have read some darker books that this collection certainly is and I appreciate some of what Cain’s writing contributed to other later writers, but I just did not enjoy these enough and had to struggle to finish. I would have much preferred to have just read the novel and one or two stories. Reading them all at once in this collection was just too much.

This book has a long introduction and a shorter afterward by Boris Dralyuk. The introduction has a lot of information about Paul Cain (whose real name is George Carol Sims) and the stories and after reading about a third of it, I stopped since I really didn't want to know that much about the stories before I read them. The afterward was worth reading though but after reading all the stories, I did not enjoy them enough to go back and finish the introduction.

Boris Dralyuk (certainly a more knowledgeable and qualified person than I am) obviously feels quite differently about the stories than I do and about Cain’s writing:

“All the same, within the confines of his genre, Cain’s work is remarkably diverse. For a virtuoso, self-imposed limitations can be assistive, even liberating—and Cain was nothing if not virtuosic. He did with the hard-boiled manner what Paganini had done with a single string.”

In the end, I would only recommend this book to people who are interested in reading more books by Cain or in trying to get a better understanding of the hard boiled writing of the 1930s, especially in the Black Mask magazine in which most of these stories are written. However, if you are interested in learning about Cain but not necessarily reading the stories, I would definitely recommend Dralyuk’s introduction as it is thorough and informative.

[Stephen Hull · Rating 3 out of 5]

An error on the part of the publisher means that this book was not quite what was described. Specifically, it contains all of Paul Cain's short stories from Black Mask (plus a trifle from Gourmet magazine) except for the five which comprise the novel Fast One. A review of Fast One will follow: this is just about the stories.

Last things first: the Gourmet magazine effort is best forgotten. The story is a little clever but the racism and sexism of another era make it a bit hard to, er, digest, as does the author's conviction that sophistication is best indicated by the use of obscure and occasionally inaccurate words. Still, to be fair, it's meant as a very slight amuse-bouche – oops, now I'm doing it…

The Black Mask stories are fun: simple, quick reads that promise little more than tough talk, murder and deceit and deliver admirably on all three counts. There's nothing great about this writing but sometimes you don't want great, you just want fun.

[Jan Moens · Rating 4 out of 5]

7,5/10