No one knew better than James M. Cain that he was never able to find the same spark in the suburbs of Washington and Baltimore that he found in the suburbs of Los Angeles. But the important thing is that he never stopped trying. He did not sit around waiting for the clock to strike. And he thought he had given Cloud Nine “the best lick I had,” as he wrote his agent, and that “it held on suspense and delivered a nice wallop.”
Frankly, the wallop at the end is something less than pure Cain. But the suspense does hold, and the prose reads well, like it was written by a 75-year-old James M. Cain — which it was.
As he said to one critic of his last novels: “I have to write as I write, I can’t young it up.”
Roy Hoopes