Cain Fast One

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84344-405-3
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Fast One is possibly the toughest tough-guy and most brutal gangster story ever written. Set in Depression Los Angeles it has a surreal quality that is positively hypnotic. It is the saga of gunman-gambler Gerry Kells and his dipso lover S. Granquist (she has no first name), who rearrange the LA underworld and 'disappear' in an explosive climax that matches their first appearance. The pace is incredible and relentless and the complex plot with its twists and turns defies summary. One Los Angeles reviewer called the book 'a ceaseless welter of bloodshed'; while the Saturday Review of Literature thought it 'the hardest-boiled yarn of a decade.' Fast One was originally a collection of stories featuring the gambler/gunman Kells. The tales ran in Black Mask magazine from 1931-1932

'Paul Cain' was the pseudonym George Carrol Sims, who also used the name Peter Ruric for his screenwriting work. He grew up on the rough streets of Chicago and claimed to have travelled extensively in his early life through central and South America, Europe and north Africa, but little concrete information is available about him apart from the fact that he dated Hollywood actress Gertrude Michael, upon whom the character of Granquist in Fast One is based.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cain, Paul

Leseproben

Introduction by
Max Décharné
Paul Cain's Fast One first appeared in the US in 1933, and then in a British edition in 1936. As debut novels go it's remarkable, but anyone holding their breath for the follow-up would have most likely been chewing their nails off in frustration - over seventy years later and there's still no sign of one. Impossible to summarise, Fast One is a lean, stripped-to-the-bone tale full of people who drink with both hands and throw money around like they print it fresh every morning just for kicks. Hardly a household name in his heyday (or these days, come to think of it), the author seems to have led a life almost as shrouded in obscurity as that of some medieval scholar: quite an achievement, given that he lived mostly in LA at a time when it was dominating the world's media and had himself worked on many Hollywood movies. So who was Paul Cain? Well, his name wasn't really Cain; or Paul for that matter. Some people knew him as Peter Ruric, others as George Ruric. He seems to have arrived in the world as George Carrol Sims in Iowa in May 1902, but much of what he did between that date and his death in Los Angeles in 1966 is a matter of speculation. Aged twenty three, the man who was later to become Paul Cain showed up in the heart of the Hollywood dream factory, calling himself George Ruric and working as a production assistant on Josef von Sternberg's 1925 silent film The Salvation Hunters, which features one Olaf Hytten as a character named simply 'The Brute'. Despite the picture's mixed audience reaction - memorably summed up in Richard Griffith and Arthur Meyer's phrase as 'even our lives are not so drab as this, and if they are we don't want to know about it' - the following year von Sternberg gave the public A Woman of the Sea, produced by Charlie Chaplin, with George Ruric listed as one of three assistant directors. After this promising start in Tinseltown, the trail then goes cold, until the elusive Mr Sims emerges in the March 1932 issue of Black Mask magazine using the name Paul Cain, with a short story called Fast One. Black Mask was then under the command of its most famous editor, Joseph T Shaw. It had begun publishing in 1920, and was by this time already justly famous as the home of pioneering crime genre giants such as Dashiell Hammett and Carroll John Daly. Having broken through into the absolute top-drawer of monthly crime fiction writing, Paul Cain followed up by publishing a new story in each issue for the next six months - Lead Party (April 1932), Black (May 1932), Velvet (June 1932), Parlour Trick (July 1932), The Heat (August 1932) and The Dark (September 1932). Five stories from among these first seven - Fast One, Lead Party, Velvet, The Heat, The Dark - were joined together in 1933 to form Cain's only novel, which was published by Doubleday of New York under the title Fast One. Advance copies carried the following cover blurb: You've read
THE MALTESE FALCON
GREEN ICE
LITTLE CAESAR
IRON MAN
hard, fast stories all, but now comes the hardest, toughest, swiftest novel of them all
FAST ONE
Two hours of sheer terror, written with a clipped violence, hypnotic in its power.
The author is
PAUL CAIN
These copies also came with a printed recommendation from another writer who was about to make his own entry into the field of crime fiction with a story in the December 1933 edition of Black Mask - a former oil executive and ex-public schoolboy named Raymond Chandler. In a phrase which has become the most famous comment about Cain's writing, Chandler called the novel 'some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner' and said that its ending was 'as murderous and at the same time poignant as anything in that manner that has ever been written.' It would be a further six years before his own debut novel, The Big Sleep, would make him internationally famous, but it's clear that even at the very start of his career Chandler's critical sense was right on the money. Fast One must have been sold to the movies even before publication, because a film adaptation appeared the same year as the novel. However, the resulting effort, released under the title Gambling Ship, seems to have been put through the Hollywood mincer and emerged as an altogether different beast. Produced by Paramount, the film had the benefit of someone who became a major Hollywood name, but is not normally associated with hard-bitten tough-guy roles. Indeed, Cary Grant, who played Ace Corbin (the character based on Fast One's Gerry Kells), was more famously occupied that year trading wisecracks with Mae West in two of her biggest successes, I'm No Angel and She Done Him Wrong. Cain received a credit on the picture (as Peter Ruric) for providing the original story, but that seems to have been the extent of his involvement: the adaptation was by Claude Binyon, while Max Marcin and Seton I Miller wrote the screenplay. Two different people wound up with a director's credit, but it doesn't seem to have helped very much, and trade bible Variety called the finished result 'a fair flicker . . . but in toto it's a familiar formula of mob vs mob.' For a while, Cain's crime writing career continued in the same high-profile fashion. Between the end of 1932 and 1936 he had a further ten stories published in Black Mask, plus the odd appearance in Star Detective Magazine and Detective Fiction Weekly, but after 1936 he seems to have abandoned fiction for good, partly because Joseph T Shaw was no longer editing Black Mask, but possibly also because his Hollywood scriptwriting career may have been proving more lucrative. For example, in 1934 he co-wrote the script for Edgar G Ulmer's classic Universal chiller The Black Cat - a defiantly over-the-top exercise in sustained menace starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. That same year he also co-scripted another film for Universal, The Affairs of a Gentleman, adapted from a play by Edith and Edward Ellis. Still based in Hollywood, in 1937 he somehow became involved in the British film Jericho, a Paul Robeson vehicle partly shot in Cairo which also starred future Dad's Army stalwart John Laurie. Cain as Peter Ruric received co-writing credit with Robert N Lee (the scriptwriter of mob classic Little Caesar) for this unlikely tale of a US army deserter who flees across Africa having joined up with a native tribe. 1939 found him back in more familiar crime territory, co-writing the original story for a Lucille Ball film called Twelve Crowded Hours, and then in 1941 he adapted a hit Broadway murder mystery by Ayn Rand for the Paramount picture The Night of January 16th. 1942 brought what is often regarded as the most successful of the crime films in which he was involved, Grand Central Murder, an MGM picture starring Van Heflin which was adapted from a novel by Sue McVeigh about a killing in New York's famous railway terminal. Cain then moved from bodies in the booking office to classics of 19th century French literature with 1944's Guy de Maupassant adaptation, Madame Fifi, for producer Val Lewton, and then in 1948 came what appears to be his last film credit, the sentimental Wallace Beery star vehicle Almost a Gentleman. After this Peter Ruric bows out of the Hollywood limelight, but Paul Cain had recently enjoyed something of a post-war resurrection when a collection of some of his old Black Mask stories was issued in book form under the title Seven Slayers in 1946. These were: Black (May 1932), Parlour Trick (July 1932), Red 71 (December 1932), One, Two, Three (May 1933), Murder In Blue (June 1933), Pigeon Blood (November 1933) and Pineapple (March 1936). It wasn't a follow-up novel to Fast One, but it was Cain's only other book, and as a collection of short, sharp hardboiled vignettes it has few equals. George Carroll Sims died in Hollywood in 1966, having apparently worked in television for a while, and also written about food for Gourmet magazine. Fast One, his finest achievement, has until now been out of print for quite some time, and yet its status among crime connoisseurs has only increased with the years, and in September 2002 at Christies in New York an advance copy of the US first edition sold for $2,868, more than three times the estimate, while copies of the 1987 No Exit edition have reached $100 a throw on eBay. As for the story itself, like Jack Carter in Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home (aka Get Carter), or William Holden and his buddies in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Gerry Kells in Fast One is someone who's been pushed too far and will not take no for an answer, even if the consequences might prove dangerous. "A few days ago - yesterday - all I wanted was to be let alone... I wasn't. I was getting along fine - quietly - legitimately - and Rose and you and all the rest of these ------ ------- gave me action." He stood up. "Alright - I'm beginning to like it." That's the basic motor for whatever plot the novel has, although mostly it seems propelled more by the logic of dreams or nightmares. Throw in Kells' alcoholic girlfriend Granquist - 'Do you want a glass or a funnel?' - some corrupt politicians, a few double-crossing racketeers and a brace of out-of-town trigger men and you have a full-blown recipe for trouble. You're after an uplifting story with a moral attached? Go somewhere else. The only possible lesson to be drawn here is that maybe standing next...