Film Music Friday: More music from film noir.

Joseph Cotten, left, with Jack Moss in Eric Ambler's
Journey into Fear (1943)

A recent episode of Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday focused on music from film noir, including selections from Double Indemnity (composer Miklós Rózsa, 1944); Journey into Fear (composer Roy Webb, 1943); Laura (composer David Raksin, 1944); Please Murder Me (composer Albert Glasser, 1956); Sorry, Wrong Number (composer Franz Waxman, 1948); and more.

Hardboiled programs, DeKalb (IL) Public Library.

From May through August, DeKalb (IL) Public Library is hosting the free monthly program "The Golden Age of Film Noir and Its Novels," discussing key novels and showing clips from their film adaptations. Authors featured include Dashiell Hammett (May 27), James M. Cain, W. R. Burnett, and Cornell Woolrich.

Photos: (left) James M. Cain; (right) Dashiell Hammett, Yank, 30 Nov. 1945; (bottom, top) illustration of W. R. Burnett by his first wife, Marjorie Burnett, 1932; Cornell Woolrich.

Knopf and Cain tussle over The Postman Always Rings Twice.

James M. Cain with Lana Turner

On the Library of Congress blog, former Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker discusses the evolution of the title of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the Cain papers in the LOC. The work began life with the unpromising title BAR-B-Que.

Homes of local mystery writers.

The website DC Writers' Homes—a project of Humanities DC—features residences of such writers as James M. Cain (6707 44th Ave, University Park, MD), Roald Dahl (2136 R St NW in DC), Rudolph Fisher (1607 S St NW in DC), Lucille Fletcher (3435 8th St S, Arlington, VA), Mary Roberts Rinehart (2419 Massachusetts Ave NW and 2660 Woodley Rd in DC), and Manley Wade Wellman (400 Shepherd St NW in DC).

Mary Roberts Rinehart with chauffeur outside her
home at 2419 Massachusetts Ave NW in
Washington, DC (now the Embassy of Zambia).
ca. 1920s-early 1930s. Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division

Elmore Leonard speaks, 1984.

This interview with Elmore Leonard was part of the First Edition TV series on PBS station WNET cohosted by noted critic John Leonard (no relation) and Nancy Evans. In it, Elmore Leonard cites such diverse influences as Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, James M. Cain, and Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) and addresses his cross-genre works, his approach to dialogue, and the National Lampoon parody of his style.

BFI's lists on "perfect crime" and noir films.

From an ad for The Killing (1956)

One of the latest lists on the British Film Institute blog is on "10 Great Films on Committing the Perfect Crime." These include The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Les Diaboliques (1954), Lift to the Scaffold (1958), The Killing (1956), and Thief (1981).

Another is a list of "10 Great American Film Noirs." Among expected entries (The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Laura) are The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and The Reckless Moment (based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall, 1949).

For GivingTuesday: Consider mystery collections.

Phoebe Atwood
Taylor. From
Barnard College's
Mortarboard, 1930

Today's Giving Tuesday focuses attention on charitable contributions, as people consider the organizations or causes to support or to make a contribution in someone's name during the holiday season.

Libraries and archives need support to acquire, preserve, catalog, and digitize their collections as well as to present exhibitions or other programs involving their holdings. Consider contributing to your alma mater's library or one of the following collections with significant mystery elements:

• Ray and Pat Browne Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University

• Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico (home of the papers of Tony Hillerman)

• Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University (home of manuscripts of many authors such as Harry Kemelman, Jane Langton, Elizabeth Linington, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Hillary Waugh, and Donald Westlake)

• Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington (home of the papers of author-critic Anthony Boucher and Mystery Writers of America)

• Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (home of Erle Stanley Gardner's "plot wheel")

• Rose Library, Emory University (home of one of the largest collections of Victorian yellowbacks)

• Special Collections, University of California Irvine (home of the papers of Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, and Margaret Millar)

• Special Collections, University of South Carolina (home of the papers of James Ellroy, George V. Higgins, and John Jakes. An ongoing and major project of the USC libraries is the preservation and digitization of 2000 Fox Movietone newsreels.)

• Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research (home of the papers of Vera Caspary, Kirk Douglas, and Dalton Trumbo. The center has recently established a portal at the Internet Archive that includes a home movie of theater legends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.)

The Library of Congress offers several options for supporting its work (don't forget that it houses the papers of luminaries such as James M. Cain), including the National Book Festival.

James M. Cain speaks on authors' rights.

This WNYC radio program with James M. Cain from October 20, 1946, discusses his plan for an American Authors' Authority designed, according to Cain in the Saturday Review, "to give a writer better terms, from publishers, employer, government and everybody else." This proposal was labeled as communist by writers such as John Dos Passos, John Erskine, Clare Boothe Luce, and Ayn Rand, who formed the American Writers' Association with other writers to block it. The Authors League (now known as the Authors Guild) seems to have been caught in the middle of the debate.

Ultimately Cain's plan was unsuccessful. Read the Saturday Review editorial on the topic, followed by the debate between Cain and James T. Farrell (author of the Studs Lonigan series) in the magazine:

Saturday Review editorial: ". . . the Authors' Authority proposal is dangerous and unworkable."

Cain--1st part, 2nd part: ". . . a group of freedom's passionate defenders have got together to resist a scowling villain with schemes like Dr. Goebbels's, meaning me."

Farrell response: ". . . Cain proposed to use the Screen Writers' Guild and the Radio Writers' Guild as instruments of coercion."

An additional note: Cain states during the program that his first novel (which would be The Postman Always Rings Twice) sells 500,000 copies per year.

Coming Soon: Crime and Detective Fiction

Crime and Detective Fiction, part of the Salem Press series Critical Insights, is scheduled for release in April. I wrote an essay for this volume—"'Your Sin Will Find You Out': Critical Perceptions of Mystery Fiction"—which examines the response to Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case, James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke, and Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per-Cent Solution. Another essay, written by Kerstin Bergman (Lund University), is on Stieg Larsson's work. The editor of the volume is Rebecca Martin (Pace University).

Cain's Slightly Scarlet (1956).

Two sisters (Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming) become entangled with a mobster (John Payne), political corruption, theft, and murder. The film is based on James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942) and directed by Allan Dwan, creator of the dolly shot.

Ardai on rediscovered Cain, From the Bookshelf.

On Gary Shapiro's From the Bookshelf, Charles Ardai talks about Hard Case Crime's release of James M. Cain's The Cocktail Waitress, the manuscript found in the files of Cain's agent and the Cain papers at the Library of Congress.

Happy birthday, Blanche Knopf.

Blanche Knopf, who cofounded the publishing firm named for her husband Alfred in 1915 and worked with writers such as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, was born today in New York City in 1894. John Thornton, who is working on a biography of the Knopfs at UT-Austin, discusses his work here.

Mostly modest prices at Bloomsbury's June 30th bibliophile auction.

Among the items sold during Bloomsbury's June 30th No-Reserve Bibliophile Sale:

• Jane Annie, a comic opera penned by J. M. Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) and Arthur Conan Doyle: $75

• Hand-corrected typescripts by James M. Cain, which include an outline of The Slim Girl (later published as Galatea, 1953), 28 pages of The Lady Is a Pirate (later published as Mignon, 1962), and an outline for The Pie Rat (another version of Mignon): $600

• Group of first-edition spy novels, which includes works by Jack Higgins and James Graham (who are both Harry Patterson) and Jeffery Hudson (aka Michael Crichton): $1200

• Proof copy of Hammond Innes's first novel The Doppelganger (1936): $75
  

• Signed copies of Richard Matheson's The Twilight Zone Scripts (1998) and Collected Stories (1989): $375

• Group of mysteries, which includes Lady Cynthia Asquith's The Black Cap (1928), Edward Acheson's Murder to Hounds (1939), Carter Dickson [John Dickson Carr]'s Death in Five Boxes (1938), Ellery Queen's The Dragon's Teeth (1939), Eric Shepherd's Murder in a Nunnery (1940), and R. A. J. Walling's The Corpse with the Red-Headed Friend (1939) and Marooned with Murder (1937): $200
  

• Group of screenplays, which includes Robert Towne's Chinatown (1973): $450
  

Happy birthday, James M. Cain.

Former New Yorker staffer and ex-newspaperman James Mallahan Cain was born today in Annapolis in 1892. Author of iconic hard-boiled works such as Mildred Pierce (1941), Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942), and Double Indemnity (1943), Cain is an inspiration to older writers (his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice [1934], was not published until he was 41).

See my earlier post on Cain at Thanksgiving from James Thurber's The Years with Ross. Go here to listen to a radio production of Love's Lovely Counterfeit with Humphrey Bogart.

James M. Cain at Thanksgiving.

Here's another excerpt from James Thurber's The Years with Ross, which provides an endearing look at one-time New Yorker employee James M. Cain:

It seems that Cain liked to work on the floor, where there was a lot of room, and used to put the Talk [of the Town] department together down there. He once lifted high the hearts of Andy [E.B.] and Katharine White, at a Thanksgiving dinner at his apartment, by putting the turkey, platter and all, on the floor and carving it, blandly going on with the story he was telling, and he told stories exceedingly well. (129)