----- Original Message ----- From: "Karin Montin" <
kmontin@sympatico.ca>
> No racism in Cain? The slurs against Mexicans and
the Greek café ¯wner
> (husband) bothered me when I read the book a few
years ago. Cora is
> insistent that she's not a "Mex," that she's white,
and the Greek is
> called greasy over and over.
Yep, this was my response too. Cain's got a real grease
fixation in POSTMAN. A quick flick through and I found these:
Cora (on Greeks): "I can't have no greasy Greek child,
Frank...The only one I can have a child by is you." Frank (on
Mexicans): "Those Mexican women, they all got big hips and
bum legs and breasts up under their chin and yellow skin and
hair that looks like it had bacon fat on it...They all got
white teeth, you've got to hand that to them."
>These remarks serve to build the characters, yet our
sympathies are
>supposed to lie with the narrator, at least at the
beginning.
Not for me. My sympathies definitely lie with Nick, the
husband. Frank and Cora are not nice people, but nice people
rarely make engaging or realistic noir protagonists. I may be
mistaken, but I doubt contemporary readers of Cain would have
seen in Cora or Frank's racial slurs anything out of the
ordinary. If they did, God help them if they read James
Ross's THEY DON'T DANCE MUCH a few years later. What is
remarkable (and, significantly, intriguing) about the racism
in POSTMAN is that Cora's remarks are directed at her
husband. As for Frank's comment on Mexican women, the irony,
as far as I can recall, is that despite her protestations to
the contrary, Cora's part-Mexican.
> In my humble opinion, The Postman Always Rings Twice
is vastly overrated.
> Cain, unlike Agatha Christie, was a two-hit wonder.
I know he wrote more
> but everyone thinks immediately of Postman and
Double Indemnity.
Not everyone, Karin. I also think of Serenade, The Butterfly,
Past All Dishonor and Sinful Woman. Some people will also
think of Mildred Pierce, maybe because of that movie. But I'm
not sure of your point here. Cain's limited output certainly
doesn't make the prolific Agatha Christie a better or more
impressive writer, just makes Christie more prolific. If
number of
'hits' is significant, Harper Lee's not even at the races. In
any case, I don't see how any comparison between the
character-driven, non-investigate noir novels of James Cain
and the plot-driven, puzzle-solving investigative
'cosies' of Agatha Christie is ever going to be relevant or
fair. They're too different. Might as well try comparing
Guinness and Coke.
I don't know if Cain is overrated (not by Chandler,
certainly, who couldn't stand him). But I do think he's one
of the most influential crime writers of all time and one of
the very few whose influence spread beyond the genre
(although some might argue that Camus' THE OUTSIDER is
noir).
Al
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 13 Nov 2005 EST