I blacked out.
I came to, and then she was there, a knife in her hand, ripping the cloth away from the outside of my leg, grabbing napkins, stanching blood, while somewhere ten miles off I could hear Jack’s voice, as he yelled into a phone. On the floor right beside me was something under a tablecloth.
That went on for some time, with Joe calming things down and some people sliding out. The band came in, and I heard a boy ask for his guitar. Somebody brought it to him. And then, at last, came the screech of sirens, and she whispered some thanks to God.
Then, while the cops were catching up, with me, with Jack, and what was under the cloth, we both went kind of haywire, me laughing, she crying, and both in each others’ arms. I said: “Lydia, Lydia, you’re not taking that plane. They legalize things in Maryland, one thing specially, except that instead of wheels, they generally use a ring.”
Still holding my leg with one hand she pulled me close with the other, kissed me and kept on kissing me, and couldn’t speak at all. All legalized now, is what I started to tell about — with Jack as best man, naturally.
Serial
James M. Cain wrote six magazine serials, all while he was in California, and he considered them “commercial stories” — written primarily for quick money from either a magazine, studio, or both. But Cain also considered “Old Man Posterity” the only judge of literary merit, and by the Old Man’s measure some of these stories have had a surprising life of their own. Double Indemnity, for example: It was Cain’s first serial, written strictly for a quick sale in the hope of capitalizing on his fame as the author of the controversial, best-selling Postman. The editor of Redbook, especially, had been pressing Ms. Haggard for a Cain mystery. But when Cain sent Double Indemnity to New York, Redbook declined it. This annoyed Cain, who told Alfred A. Knopf that he considered the story “a piece of tripe [that] will never go between hardcovers while I live. The penalty, I suppose, for doing something like this is that you don’t even sell it to magazines.”
Cain gave serious thought to rewriting Double Indemnity in the manner of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, exploring “what forces of destiny brought these particular people to this dreadful spot, at this particular time, on this particular day.” But before he could rework it, Edith Haggard sold Double Indemnity to Liberty, and when it came out over eight weeks in early 1936, it created a sensation. Liberty immediately wanted another, and Cain by then needed money to finance a trip to Mexico to research his still-evolving Serenade. So he wrote a serial about a female opera star whose businessman husband suddenly discovers his voice is better than his wife’s. Cain called this one Two Can Sing, but when he sent it to New York, Liberty turned it down. The editor wanted more murder. Then 20th Century-Fox bought Two Can Sing for $8,000. (It was made twice into movies, in 1939 as Wife, Husband and Friend starring Loretta Young, Warner Baxter, Binnie Barnes, and Cesar Romero, and in 1949 as Everybody Does It starring Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, and Celeste Holm.) Later, after it sold to the American, it proved the most popular short novel the magazine ever published. The editor, Albert Benjamin, pleaded with Cain for another. By now, Serenade had been published, creating almost as much excitement as Postman, and Cain was hotter than ever.
His next serial grew out of a conversation he once had with a Collier’s editor (“How about a Cinderella story with a modern twist? What about a waitress marrying a Harvard man?”). He wrote it specifically with Collier’s in mind, but when his agent sent the magazine the story — called Modern Cinderella — Collier’s turned it down, primarily, Cain thought, because it was also concerned with organized labor. But Universal bought it for $17,500 late in 1937 and made it into a soppy little film called When Tomorrow Comes, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer.
The following year, Cain wrote Money and the Woman, which Liberty bought immediately. It was also sold to Warner Brothers, and the studio assigned the script to Robert Presnell. When the film, starring Jeffrey Lynn and Brenda Marshall, was released in 1940, Variety said the script was all right and the story okay, “but somewhere along the line, the plot went askew. Result is a mild ‘B’ film.”
Cain did not attempt another serial until late 1941, when, recuperating from an operation and needing money, he wrote Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. It was, he said, the only story he ever wrote with the movies in mind. But it was also a story about the seamier side of city politics, and after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II, neither the magazines nor the studios were interested in fiction criticizing American institutions, and the story never sold.
The following year, still needing money and having a difficult time adjusting to the mood of wartime America, Cain wrote another serial, a story about the involvement between a Reno sheriff and a movie star whose husband is murdered. It was essentially a rewrite of his unproduced play, 7-11, about a Broadway actress, a New York writer, and a murder in a nightclub similar to “21.” He called the story Galloping Domino, but it also failed to sell to either the magazines or a studio.
His next and final attempt at a serial came four years later. By then, Double Indemnity had been published in hardcover and made into a movie, and one of its stars, Edward G. Robinson, had been asking Cain if he would write another story featuring Keyes, the insurance agent Robinson plays in the film. Cain wrote a story about an insurance agent named Ed Horner and a beautiful woman involved in a complicated divorce action in Reno. It also included the character Keyes and several references, in the first draft, at least, to Double Indemnity. But Robinson did not like the story, which Cain called Nevada Moon and, like Galloping Domino, it never sold to either a magazine or a studio.
Cain’s curious career as a magazine serial writer is even stranger when you consider the book-publishing history of these six serials. In 1943, Knopf gathered three of them — Double Indemnity, Two Can Sing (now called Career in C Major), and Money and the Woman (changed to The Embezzler) — into a single hardcover volume titled Three of a Kind. Considering that Cain thought Double Indemnity a “piece of tripe,” and that all his magazine serials were written as commercial quickies, the collection was given a remarkable reception. It was highly praised by the critics, with John K. Hutchens calling Cain “a writer who holds you by the sheer, dazzling pace he sets.” Of the three serials in the Knopf hardcover collection, only Double Indemnity had not already been made into a movie. But the literary response to Three of a Kind enabled Cain’s Hollywood agent, H. N. Swanson, to revive studio interest in the story, which resulted in the now-classic Billy Wilder-Raymond Chandler film.