Cain had become a fan of Ring Lardner just before World War I, when Lardner’s stories about a fictional baseball player named Jack Keefe were appearing in the Saturday Evening Post. In France, Cain wrote letters to his brother, Boydie, a young Marine pilot destined to die in a tragic accident after the Armistice. In these letters, Cain imitated Lardner’s style, and he later said it was the “only time I consciously imitated anybody.” Lardner obviously had an impact on his early dialogues and short stories written for the World and Mercury, but as Cain found out when he tried to write his novel in 1922, the colloquial dialect invariably became tedious in a long story.
So Cain put his idea for a novel in the back of his mind and decided to try another short story. The result was “The Baby in the Icebox,” and, like “Pastorale” and “Montfaucon,” it was written in the first person, Ring Lardner style. But unlike his earlier stories, “The Baby in the Icebox” was set in the West and had characters who were western in origin. Suddenly Cain found something happening in his fiction. When he wrote about the western roughneck — “the boy who is just as elemental inside as his eastern colleague, but who has been to high school, completes his sentences and uses reasonably good grammar” — the first-person technique did not begin to grate after fifty pages and he did not have to drive the reader crazy with all the “ain’ts,” “brungs,” and “fittens.” Maybe now he was ready for long fiction — at least longer than he had been writing, if not a full-length novel. In fact, James M. Cain did not really need to write a full-length novel; he had developed a style which enabled him to tell a story in about half the space required by the average novelist.
Cain sent “The Baby in the Icebox” to Mencken, who liked it and wrote back that it was “one of the best things you have ever done.” The story attracted considerable attention when it was published in the Mercury in 1933, and Cain’s agent immediately sold it to Paramount for $1,000. The studio gave it to screenwriters Casey Robinson and Frank Adams, who turned it into Cain’s first movie — She Made Her Bed, starring Richard Arlen, Sally Eilers, and Robert Armstrong. Paramount had wanted to cast Baby Le Roy as the baby who ends up in the icebox, but he had outgrown the part, so they gave it to Richard Arlen, Jr., instead.
The success of “The Baby in the Icebox” convinced Cain that he was now ready for his novel about the California drifter who conspires with the wife of a gas station owner to murder her husband. In endless discussions with his friend, screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, Cain hit on an approach to the story. Lawrence had mentioned a curious fact about the famous Snyder-Gray murder case (which had dominated the newspapers in 1927): When Ruth Snyder had sent Judd Gray, her lover, off to Syracuse the night she murdered her husband, she had given Gray a bottle of wine — and later, when the police lab analyzed it, they discovered enough arsenic there to kill a regiment. When Lawrence told him this, Cain said: “Well, that jells this idea I’ve had for such a story; a couple of jerks who discover that a murder, though dreadful enough morally, can be a love story too, but then wake up to discover that once they’ve pulled the thing off, no two people can share this terrible secret and live on the same earth. They turn against each other, as Judd and Ruth did.”
So Cain started his novel with an opening sentence that would eventually be quoted over and over again in college writing courses: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The novel, of course, was The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the young man thrown off the truck was Frank Chambers (played by John Garfield in the 1946 MGM production of Postman and by Jack Nicholson in the more recent Lorimar version). And when the little 188-page book came out in 1934, it created a sensation that is difficult to comprehend today, when almost every other big novel seems to make news, with a six- or seven-figure sale to paperbacks and a rich contract for TV or movie rights. In 1934 that kind of success for a book was scarcely known. In fact, Postman was probably the first of the big fiction successes in American publishing, the first novel to hit for “the grand slam,” meaning a hardcover best-seller, paperback best-seller, syndication, play, and movie. It scored more than once in all media, and still it goes on and on, selling today both in a Knopf hardcover edition called Cain X 3 and in a Vintage paperback.
If there was one single review that started Postman on the way to its dizzying success, it was Franklin P. Adams’s in the New York Herald Tribune. Adams was positively ecstatic in his praise, calling it the “most engrossing, unlaydownable book that I have any memory of.” And that was just a starter. Whereas the New York Times review (as did many to follow) quoted the now-famous first sentence of Postman, Adams said: “I once thought the first chapter of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge was the greatest first chapter in English fiction.” But now he thought Postman’s first chapter might be literature’s greatest, and to back up his case, he reprinted the entire chapter in his review.
Other critics were equally enthusiastic. Gertrude Atherton, a popular novelist, was shocked at the story but recognized the book’s power nevertheless. “There are several disgusting themes and the characters are scum,” she wrote, “but that book is a work of art. So beautifully is it built, so superb is its economy of word and incident, so authentic its characters and so exquisite the irony of its finish, it is a joy to any writer who respects his art.”
Postman started slow in this country and then “took a standing broad jump,” as Cain put it, onto the best-seller lists, and it stayed there for weeks. MGM, carried away by all the excitement over the novel, bought it for $25,000, knowing full well it would be difficult to produce a script the Hays Office would approve and, in fact, it was twelve years before the studio finally filmed Postman.
With Postman, Cain had produced that rarest of literary achievements — a best-seller widely acclaimed by the critics. As a result, he was immediately in demand everywhere: Knopf wanted him to write another novel; MGM hired him to work on a film to star Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald (which was never completed); a Broadway producer wanted him to do a play based on Postman; and magazine editors were clamoring for Cain short stories and, especially, serials, having noted that Postman’s compactness and periodic plot twists made it ideal for six- or eight-part installment stories, a genre very popular in the 1930s.
So began one of the most unusual literary-cum-Hollywood careers in the country’s history. From 1933 to 1948, when he left Hollywood, James M. Cain wrote more than two dozen short stories (not all of which were published), six magazine serials, seven novels (most of which were best-sellers), and two plays (one of which, Postman, was produced on Broadway, while the other, 7-11, was staged in a summer production in Cohasset, but never reached New York City). At the same time, thirteen movies were made from his stories, including the classic Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson; Mildred Pierce, which won an Academy Award for Joan Crawford in 1945; and the first version of Postman. All of these movies were scripted by other writers while Cain was going from one studio job to another, working his way up from $400 a week to $2,500. From Hollywood alone, he made an estimated $388,000 in those years, approximately one-third of it from the sale of his stories to the studios and two-thirds from salaries earned while working in the studios. Yet in all that studio work, he achieved only three shared credits — for Stand Up and Fight (starring Wallace Beery and Robert Taylor), Gypsy Wildcat (Maria Montez), and Algiers (Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer). Cain’s studio career, by his own estimate, was a total failure. “I wanted the picture money,” he said, trying to explain his Hollywood experience, “and I worked like a dog to get it. I parked my pride, my esthetic convictions, my mind outside on the street, and did everything to be a success in this highly paid trade... [but] even working in a whorehouse, the girl has to like the work a little bit, and I could not like pictures.”