by Cain, Paul
I owe my deepest gratitude to Mike and Peggy Harrelson, son and second wife of the man at the center of this essay. To say that they have been gracious would be an understatement. Their generosity and warmth were an unexpected gift. I would not have made contact with Mike were it not for a chain of remarkable coincidences, one of which placed me in the basement of UCLA’s Young Research Library on the same day that Professor William Marling of Case Western Reserve University was conducting his own research on the Hagemann collection. Bill asked me what I was up to, I told him, and he mentioned that he was in touch with the Harrelson family. I remain in his debt.
Mike’s initial letter to Bill Marling, in which he describes himself and his brother, is worth quoting: “Peter [Craig Harrelson is an] emergency room doctor who works very little and incessantly travels the planet’s backwaters. He’s a colorful cat who marches to his own drummer. I, while much less charismatic, have made part of my living with a pen.” Their father, of whom they knew very little until recently, seems to have passed on a gift for language and a thirst for adventure, as well as some other curious traits. I am told that, like his father, Peter Craig has been known to rename his girlfriends.
The Harrelsons have supplied me with a wealth of information about Paul Cain/Peter Ruric’s later years, which I am honored to pass on to his readers. Peggy’s memories and insights have added color and nuance to an unnaturally stark image – an image of Cain’s own making. Nothing represents this contribution more vividly than the three photographs of Cain/Ruric, Peggy, and their son Peter Craig, taken in the summer of 1957 at the Gregson family home in Varina, Virginia. These candid, animated family portraits are a necessary corrective to Cain’s stylized black-and-white author photo from the early ’30s; the author photo was intended to disguise his identity, while the later shots capture the man at his happiest, among his loved ones, off-guard.
Much of what we know about Sims’s ancestry and early childhood owes to the pioneering work of Lynn F. Myers, Jr. and Max Allan Collins, whose research has cleared up a great number of longstanding mysteries. I am grateful to Lisa Burks, a journalist and author working on the history of Glendale’s Grand View Memorial Park, who provided invaluable information about Sims/Ruric/Cain’s cremation records. I must also thank David A. Bowman, whose writing on Cain was nothing short of groundbreaking. Bowman’s work was interrupted by a terrible accident in 1989, from which he recovered. He continued to write fiction, but abandoned his biography of Cain. He passed away on February 27, 2012, at the age of 54.
Cain/Ruric, Peggy, and their son Peter Craig, taken in the summer of 1957 at the Gregson family home in Varina, Virginia. Copyright © 2012 Peggy, Michael Sean, and Peter Craig Harrelson. Published here for the first time from the Cain/Ruric/Harrelson family records, and the Black Mask Magazine archives.
Works Cited and Further Reading:
Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932.
Ballard, Todhunter. “Writing for the Pulps.” In Hollywood Troubleshooter: W. T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox Stories, edited and introduced by James L. Traylor. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1985. Pp. 8-18.
Bogdanovich, Peter. “Edgar G. Ulmer.” In Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997. Pp. 558-604.
Bowman, David A. “Cold Trail: The Life of Paul Cain.” In Fast One. Berkeley, CA: Black Lizard, 1987.
Brandon, William. “Back in the Old Black Mask.” The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 706-16.
Carr, Larry. “Myrna Loy.” In More Fabulous Faces: The Evolution and Metamorphosis of Dolores Del Rio, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Pp. 53-108.
Duhamel, Marcel. Raconte pas ta vie. Paris: Mercure de France, 1972.
Faust, Irvin. “Afterword.” In Fast One. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Pp. 305-16.
Fischer, Dennis. “The Black Cat.” In Boris Karloff. Edited by Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla. Baltimore: Midnight Marquee, 1996. Pp. 91-113.
Gunn, Peter. “Paul Cain, 1902-1966.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 306: American Mystery and Detective Writers. Edited by George Parker Anderson. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2005. Pp. 35-43.
Hagemann, E. R. “Introducing Paul Cain and His Fast One: A Forgotten Hard-Boiled Writer, a Forgotten Gangster Novel.” Armchair Detective 12, no. 1 (January 1979): 72-76.
Haut, Woody. “The Postman Rings Twice but the Iceman Walks Right in: Paul Cain and James. M. Cain.” In Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002. Pp. 76-101.
Loy, Myrna, and James Kotsilibas-Davis. Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming. New York: Knopf, 1987.
MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976.
Myers, Lynn F., Jr. and Max Allan Collins. “Chasing Shadows: The Life of Paul Cain.” In The Complete Slayers. Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2011. Pp. 9-32. This volume also carries introductions to individual stories by Ed Gorman, Joe Gores, Edward D. Hoch, John Lutz, and Bill Pronzini, Robert Randisi, and others.
Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.
Shaw, Joseph. “Greed, Crime, and Politics.” Black Mask (March 1931).
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937.
—. “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.” In What are Masterpieces (Los Angeles, CA: The Conference Press, 1940). Pp. 83-95.
Weaver, Tom. “Shirley Ulmer.” In I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Pp. 227-49.
Wilt, David E. “Paul Cain.” In Hardboiled in Hollywood. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. 97-120.
1Joseph Shaw, discarded introduction to The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), box 5, folder 6, of the Joseph T. Shaw Papers (2052), UCLA’s Young Research Library. Quoted more extensively in E. R. Hagemann, “Introducing Paul Cain and His Fast One: A Forgotten Hard-Boiled Writer, a Forgotten Gangster Novel,” Armchair Detective 12, no. 1 (January 1979): 75.
2William Brandon, “Back in the Old Black Mask,” The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 707.
3Ibid., 708.
4Joseph Shaw, “Greed, Crime, and Politics,” Black Mask (March 1931), 9. Quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 46.
5Irvin Faust, “Afterword,” in Fast One (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 311.
6See Lynn F. Myers, Jr. and Max Allan Collins, “Chasing Shadows: The Life of Paul Cain,” in The Complete Slayers (Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2011), 13-17, for information on Sims’s ancestry and early childhood.
7Myers and Collins, 17; Los Angeles City Directory (1923), 2810.
8Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 218.
9Los Angeles City Directory, 2810.
10Myrna Loy and James Kotsilibas-Davis, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming (New York: Knopf, 1987), 42. See also Larry Carr, “Myrna Loy,” in More Fabulous Faces: The Evolution and Metamorphosis of Dolores Del Rio, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 55.
11Tom Weaver, “Shirley Ulmer,” in I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 233.
12Peter Bogdanovich, “Edgar G. Ulmer,” in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Knopf, 1997), 575.
13David A. Bowman, “Cold Trail: The Life of Paul Cain,” in Fast One (Berkeley, CA: Black Lizard, 1987), vii. See also Dennis Fischer, “The Black Cat,” in Bo
ris Karloff, ed. Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee, 1996), 94-95.
14Bowman, viii.
15Ibid.
16Myers and Collins, 29-30.
17Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 727. See also ibid., 707.
18Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. Parts 3-4: Dramas and Works Prepared for Oral Delivery, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Library of Congress, Copyright Office, 1947), 206; Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. Part 2: Periodicals, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Copyright Office, Library of Congress, 1949), 76.
19Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), 4.
20Idem, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in What are Masterpieces (Los Angeles, CA: The Conference Press, 1940), 87.
21Marcel Duhamel, Raconte pas ta vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 549-50. This episode is also discussed in Peter Gunn, “Paul Cain, 1902-1966,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 306: American Mystery and Detective Writers, ed. George Parker Anderson (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2005), 42.
22Ibid., 549.
23Ibid., 550.
24Bowman, x.
25Myers and Collins, 28.
26Ibid., 22.
Cover Gallery
Black
The man said: “McCary.”
“No.” I shook my head and started to push past him, and he said: “McCary,” again thickly, and then he crumpled into a heap on the wet sidewalk.
It was dark there, there wasn’t anyone on the street—I could have walked away. I started to walk away and then the sucker instinct got the best of me and I went back and bent over him.
I shook him and said: “Come on, chump—get up out of the puddle.”
A cab came around the corner and its headlights shone on me—and there I was, stooping over a drunk whom I’d never seen before, who thought my name was McCary. Any big-town driver would have pegged it for a stickup, would have shoved off or sat still. That wasn’t a big town—the cab slid alongside the curb and a fresh-faced kid stuck his face into the light from the meter and said: “Where to?”
I said: “No place.” I ducked my head at the man on the sidewalk. “Maybe this one’ll ride—he’s paralyzed.”
The kid clucked: “Tch, tch.”
He opened the door and I stooped over and took hold of the drunk under his armpits and jerked him up and across the sidewalk and into the cab. He was heavy in a funny limp way. There was a hard bulge on his left side, under the arm.
I had an idea. I asked the kid: “Who’s McCary?”
He looked self-consciously blank for a minute and then he said: “There’s two—Luke and Ben. Luke’s the old man—owns a lot of real estate. Ben runs a poolhall.”
“Let’s go see Ben.” I said. I got into the cab.
We went several blocks down the dark street and then I tapped on the glass and motioned to the kid to pull over to the curb. He stopped and slid the glass and I said: “Who’s McCary?”
The kid made the kind of movement with his shoulders that would pass for a shrug in the sticks. “I told you—he runs a poolhall.”
I said: “Listen. This guy came up to me a few minutes ago and said ‘McCary’—this guy is very dead.”
The kid looked like he was going to jump out of the cab. His eyes were hanging out.
I waited.
The kid swallowed. He said: “Let’s dump him.”
I shook my head slightly and waited.
“Ben and the old man don’t get along—they’ve been raising hell the last couple of weeks. This is the fourth,” he jerked his head towards the corpse beside me.
“Know him?”
He shook his head and then—to be sure—took a flashlight out of the sidepocket and stuck it back through the opening and looked at the man’s dead face.
He shook his head again.
I said: “Let’s go see Ben.”
“You’re crazy, Mister. If this is one of Ben’s boys he’ll tie you up to it, and if it ain’t… .”
“Let’s go see Ben.”
Ben McCary was a blond fat man, about forty—he smiled a great deal.
We sat in a little office above his poolhall and he smiled heartily across all his face and said: “Well, sir—what can I do for you?”
“My name is Black. I came over from St Paul—got in about a half hour ago.”
He nodded, still with the wide hearty smile; stared at me cordially out of his wide-set blue eyes.
I went on: “I heard there was a lot of noise over here and I thought I might make a connection—pick up some change.”
McCary juggled his big facial muscles into something resembling innocence.
“I don’t know just what you mean, Buddy,” he said. “What’s your best game?”
“What’s yours?”
He grinned again. “Well,” he said, “you can get plenty of action up in the front room.”
I said: “Don’t kid me, Mister McCary. I didn’t come over here to play marbles.”
He looked pleasantly blank.
“I used to work for Dickie Johnson down in KC,” I went on.
“Who sent you to me?”
“Man named Lowry—that’s the name on the label of his coat. He’s dead.”
McCary moved a little in his chair but didn’t change his expression.
“I came in on the nine-fifty train,” I went on, “and started walking uptown to a hotel. Lowry came up to me over on Dell Street and said ‘McCary,’ and fell down. He’s outside in a cab—stiff.”
McCary looked up at the ceiling and then down at the desk. He said: “Well, well”—and took a skinny little cigar out of a box in one of the desk drawers and lighted it. He finally got around to looking at me again and said: “Well, well,” again.
I didn’t say anything.
After he’d got the cigar going he turned another of his big smiles on and said: “How am I supposed to know you’re on the level?”
I said; “I’ll bite. What do you think?”
He laughed. “I like you.” he said. “By God! I like you.”
I said I thought that was fine. “Now let’s try to do some business.”
“Listen,” he said. “Luke McCary has run this town for thirty years. He ain’t my old man—he married my mother and insisted on my taking his name.”
He puffed slowly at his cigar. “I guess I was a pretty ornery kid”—he smiled boyishly—“when I came home from school I got into a jam—you know—kid stuff. The old man kicked me out.”
I lighted a cigarette and leaned back.
“I went down to South America for about ten years, and then I went to Europe. I came back here two years ago and everything was all right for a while and then the old man and I got to scrapping again.”
I nodded.
“He’d had everything his own way too long. I opened about three months ago and took a lot of his game business away—a lot of the shipyard men and miners… .”
McCary paused, sucked noisily at his cigar.
“Luke went clean off his nut,” he went on. “He thought I was going to take it all away from him… .” McCary brought his big fist down hard on the desk. “And by the Christ! I am. Lowry’s the third man of mine in two weeks. It’s plenty in the open now.”
I said: “How about Luke’s side?”
“We got one of the bastards,” he said. “A runner.”
“It isn’t entirely over the gambling concession?”
“Hell, no. That’s all it was at first. All I wanted was to make a living. Now I’ve got two notch-joints at the other end of town. I’ve got a swell protection in with the law and I’m building up a liquor business that would knock your eye out.”
I asked: “Is Luke in it b
y himself?”
McCary shook his head slowly. “He don’t show anywhere. There’s a fella named Stokes runs the works for him—a young fella. They been partners nearly eight years. It’s all in Stokes’ name… .”
“What does Stokes look like?”
“Tall—about your build. Shiny black hair and a couple of big gold teeth”—McCary tapped his upper front teeth with a fat finger—“here.”
I said: “How much is he worth to you?”
McCary stood up. He leaned across the desk and grinned down at me and said: “Not a nickel.” His eyes were wide and dear like a baby’s. He said slowly: “The old man is worth twenty-five hundred smackers to you.”
I didn’t say anything and McCary sat down and opened another drawer and took out a bottle of whiskey. He poured a couple of drinks.
“I think the best angle for you,” he said, “is to go to Stokes and give him the same proposition you gave me. Nobody saw you come in here. It’s the only way you can get near the old man.”
I nodded. We drank.
“By God! I like your style,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get along with an outfit of yokels.”
We smiled at one another. I was glad he said he liked me because I knew he didn’t like me at all. I was one up on him, I didn’t like him very well either.
Stokes sat on a corner of the big library table, his long legs dangling.
He said: “You’re airing Ben—how do we know you’ll play ball with us?” His eyes were stony.
I looked at the old man. I said: “I don’t like that fat—son of yours—and I never double-cross the best offer.”
Luke McCary was a thin little man with a pinched red face, bushy white hair. He sat in a big armchair on the other side of the table, his head and neck and wild white hair sticking up out of the folds of a heavy blue bathrobe.