James M. Cain - Career

Career

Upon returning to the United States, he continued working as a journalist, writing editorials for the New York World and a play, a short story, and satirical pieces for American Mercury. He briefly served as the managing editor of The New Yorker, but later focused on screenplays and novels.

Cain's first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934. Two years later the serialized Double Indemnity was published in Liberty magazine.

Cain made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute in tow); Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the only daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer); and Career in C Major (a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovers that he has a better voice than she does). In the novel the Moth, the music is also very present for the main character. Cain's fourth wife, Florence Macbeth, was a retired opera singer.

Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name appears as a screenwriter only in the credits of three films. For Algiers (1938) Cain receives an "additional dialogue" credit only; for both Stand Up and Fight (1939) and Gypsy Wildcat (1944) he is one of three credited screenplay writers.