The Paul Cain Omnibus (2 page)

In other stories, Cain mastered the tone of breezy, world-weary confidence—which implies total competence. Keenan of “Dutch Treat” (December 1936) could take up any of the Continental Op’s cases midstream without missing a beat:

Our firm—the Old Man was it, Lefty and I just worked for him—handled more insurance cases than anything else and had a pretty swell reputation—as reputations of confidential investigating outfits go.

Hammett, that Lefty, would be proud. An even breezier tone whistles through the pages of “One, Two, Three” (May 1933), this time with a witty formal justification: The unidentified P.I. recounts his case during a poker game, punctuating the narrative with an occasional “I’ll take three off the top, please” and “Pass.” The cards bring their own momentum to the table.

This touches on another of Cain’s abiding themes, or rather, motifs: the gambling mentality. Be they grist for the mill of a penny-ante racket—like the black cabby Lonny in “555” (December 1935)—or high-rollers like Kells in
Fast One
, Shane in “Red 71” (December 1932), and Finn in “Sockdolager” (Aril 1936), Cain’s characters are always eloquent barometers for the thrills and desperations of the sporting life:

That Number Two spot was an inspiration. The Santa Anita track had just opened and all Southern California had gone nag-nutty. We got the cream in Number two; at two o’clock of any afternoon in the week you could stand in the middle of the main room and poke your finger in the eye of anywhere from ten to two dozen picture stars, wives of stars, “cousins” of producers, and just plain rich women. If you think men are natural gamblers you ought to see a lot of gals who can afford it in a bunch. A two grand parlay was chickenfeed. (“Sockdolager”)

Cain’s dominant character is the incorrigible gambler, the risk-taker who lives and dies by his hunches. Criminals and their pursuers have that trait in common, and in Cain’s fiction, it’s seldom clear which is which. Cain makes the most of this irony in “Hunch” (March 1934), where the seasoned detective Cy Brennan follows his nose down a blind alley, taking the reader right along with him:

She was staring at him with wide hard eyes: one eyebrow was arched to a thin skeptical line, her red mouth curved humorously upward at the corners. She said with broad, biting sarcasm: “The old Brennan hunches—they never miss …”

Keith Alan Deutsch addresses the thrill-seeking impulse inherent to so many of Cain’s characters in his afterword to
Fast One
, and shrewdly identifies its effect; Kells and his ilk confront us with a bracing, “clean” amorality. They are indeed the true forerunners of both Lee Marvin in
Point Blank
(1967) and Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon
(1987).

Cain’s virtuosity extends to his perfectly pitched depictions of disparate social strata. His narratives move effortlessly from the Roosevelt Hotel to a dirty flophouse, and his characters react to these shifts in various ways. “St. Nick” Green circulates among “legman, Park Avenue debutantes, pickpockets, touts, bank robbers and bank presidents, wardheelers, and international confidence men,” but remains a
parvenu
, spending “more of his time in night courts than in nightclubs.” Whereas Druse, a mysterious retired judge in “Pigeon Blood” (November 1933), exudes an elegance and sophistication alien to most of Cain’s protagonists: “Druse leaned forward. ‘I am not a fixer,’ he said. ‘My acquaintance is wide and varied—I am fortunate in being able to wield certain influences.’” There is a great deal of reserve in Druse’s speech; it may be the reticence of a man guarding old wounds.

Only a writer freely exploring the boundaries of his genre could have produced such a variety of stories in so short a time. It is, in a sense, fitting that the man behind this protean achievement was himself so protean.

* * *

On November 2, 1986 the 
Los Angeles Times
 ran the following ad in the classifieds:

Information Sought

I am writing a biography of the
hard-boiled novelist Paul Cain
(a.k.a. Peter Ruric/George Sims),
author of the classic Los Angeles
gangster novel “Fast One” (1933).
I would appreciate hearing from
anyone with letters or biographical
information.

DAVID A. BOWMAN

Bowman never did produce his book-length biography. He could only scrape so much together, and much of what he found couldn’t be verified. Along with essays by E. R. Hagemann and Peter Gunn, and book chapters by David E. Wilt and Woody Haut, Bowman’s introduction to the 1987 Black Lizard edition of 
Fast One
 is still one of the best sources on Cain’s life. Recent work by Lynn F. Myers Jr. and Max Allan Collins has added to Bowman’s portrait. And yet, thanks largely to his own efforts, Cain has remained a cipher.

The photo that originally appeared on
Fast One
’s jacket is a high-angle, ¾ portrait of Cain’s bearded face, with a diagonal white bar across his eyes. It’s the only published picture we have of him, and might as well have been taken by Man Ray. The white band is an obvious but striking feature. So is his first self-­obliterating, deflective, yet spasmodically revealing autobiographical sketch, which begins:

PAUL CAIN

isn
’
t his real name.

is slender, blond, usually bearded.

has wasted his first thirty years as a

matter of course and principle; wan-

dered over South America, Europe,

northern Africa and the Near East;

been a buson
’
s-mate, Dada painter,

gambler, and a
“
no
”
-man in Holly-

wood.

likes Mercedes motor-cars, peanut

butter, Gstaad, and phonograph

records of Leslie Hutchinson, Scotch

whiskey, some of the paintings of

Chirico, gardenias, vegetables and

sour cream, Garbo, Richebourg

1904, and Little Pam.

dislikes parsnips, the color pink,

sopranos, men who wear white silk

sox, backgammon, cigars and a great

many men, women, and children.

Cain’s lies—and many were to follow in subsequent autobiographical statements—form a predictable pattern: unlikely ports of call, unbelievable occupations, and preposterous literary accomplishments. He never completed “a new novel of crime and blood and thunder, tentatively titled 
Three in the Dark
,” and no library in the world holds “a melodramatic farce” titled 
Young Man Sees God
, or any of his other supposed titles: 
Hypersensualism: A Practical Philosophy for Acrobats
; 
Syncopaen
; 
The Naked Man
; 
Advertisement for Death
; 
Broad
; 
The Cock-Eyed Angel
; or 
Seven Men Named Caesar
. Nor is it likely that anyone will ever track down the long-lost acetate reels of Cain’s “motion picture to end motion pictures entitled 
Grapefruit and You
,” which somehow calls to mind the Gerry Kells-like Jimmy Cagney flattening a grapefruit on Mae Clarke’s face in 
The Public Enemy
 (1931)—except 
you’re
 Mae Clarke. And of course 
Fast One
, too, might just be a gag.

Cain was, in fact, an Iowan named George Caryl Sims, born in Des Moines on May 30, 1902, to one-time police detective and drugstore owner William Dow Sims and his wife Eva, née Freberg, the daughter of Swedish immigrants.
6
The exact date of his family’s relocation to Los Angeles remains unknown; the young Sims and his mother, who was by then divorced, probably made the move in 1921, while his father and paternal grand­father, George C. Sims, a Union veteran of the Civil War, joined them a few years later. Although Myers and Collins had found William Sims listed as a salesman in the 1924 Des Moines City Directory, the 1923 Los Angeles City Directory has William D. Sims, George C. Sims, and George C. Sims, “Jr.” residing at 1201 June St., while Mrs. Eva W. Sims is described as a stenographer at 6026-D Hollywood Blvd.
7

One can guess at the reasons for the family’s exodus from Des Moines to “double Dubuque,” as H. L. Mencken dubbed it. Boom-time Los Angeles was a magnet for well-heeled Midwesterners like the elder George C. Sims. Louis Adamic described these “Folks” of the ’20s—evocatively and not without sympathy—in his autobiography
Laughing in the Jungle
(1932):

They were pioneers back in Ioway and Nebraska. No doubt they swindled a little, but they always prayed a little, too, or maybe a great deal. And they paid taxes and raised young ones. They are old and rheumatic. They sold out their farms and businesses in the Middle West and wherever they used to live, and now they are here in California—sunny California—to rest and regain their vigor, enjoy climate, look at pretty scenery, live in little bungalows with a palm-tree or banana plant out front, and eat in cafeterias. Toil-broken and bleached out, they flock to Los Angeles, fugitives from the simple, inexorable justice of life, from hard labor and drudgery, from cold winters and blistering summers of the prairies… .
8

Los Angeles also drew younger Midwesterners on the make. Indeed, the most revealing detail of the routine, telegraphic entry in the 1923 City Directory has nothing to do with the Sims family’s living arrangement. It’s a matter of professional ambition. George C. Sims, Jr.—twenty-one years of age—is registered as an “author.”
9
In the mid-’20s, probably eager to shake the image of an Iowan bumpkin, Sims rechristened himself Ruric (first George, then Peter). He began cutting a figure in Hollywood, grabbing production assistant and assistant director credits on Josef von Sternberg’s
The Salvation Hunters
(1925) and
A Woman at Sea
(1926), respectively.

It was at this time that his flair for pseudonyms left a permanent mark on Myrna Williams, a young starlet searching for a screen name. In her memoir, 
Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming
 (1987), she writes: “Peter Rurick [
sic
], a wild Russian writer of free verse, suddenly came up with ‘Myrna Loy.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ It sounded alright, but I still wasn’t convinced about changing my name.”
10
A Russian free-verse poet? Surely a ruse, but his research was passable. He probably borrowed Peter from Peter the Great, and Ruric from the ninth-century founder of the Rurikid dynasty. And Myrna Loy, for its part, sounds suspiciously similar to Mina Loy, a real free-verse poet. Cain would later claim to have published in 
Blast
 and
transition
. Anachronistic fabrications, but evidence of wide-ranging reading. He would have run across Mina Loy’s work in the little magazines. A couple of her “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914) even seem to predict Cain’s distinctly modernistic aesthetic: “IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed. AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.”

By 1930 he was in New York. His stint there yielded a new persona—Paul Cain—and a bruising relationship with an actress named Gertrude Michael, who matched the alcoholic Sims drink for drink. In 1932 she landed an M-G-M screen test in Hollywood, and he tagged along. They took up residence at the stately Montecito Hotel & Apartments (6650 Franklin Avenue), where he crossed paths with a fellow
Black Mask
regular, Raoul Whitfield. It was here that Sims completed
Fast One
, dedicating it to Michael, who likely served as the model for Granquist, Kells’s alcoholic moll. He sold the novel’s story to Paramount, which turned it into
Gambling Ship
(1933), a lumbering vehicle for Cary Grant and Benita Hume. Sims and Michael split when the book was still hot off the presses; as the
L. A. Times
gossip columnist “Tip Poff” put on October 23, 1933, “Peter Ruric (Paul Cain) and Gertrude Michael are going places. But not together.” How right he was: the three of them—Ruric, Cain, and Michael—would chart their own courses.

As Ruric, Sims enjoyed a respectable if humdrum career in screenwriting, which began with work on the script to
Affairs of a Gentleman
(1934). His most distinguished effort was the screenplay for Edgar G. Ulmer’s
The Black Cat
 (1934), a masterpiece of expressionistic horror. In a January 1998 interview with Tom Weaver, Shirley Ulmer described her husband’s collaborator as “brilliant, really, but
cuckoo
. […] He wasn’t like any
ordinary
person I’d ever met. But very, very brilliant—Edgar adored him, and they were very close.”
11
Edgar Ulmer’s own assessment, given to Peter Bogdanovich in 1970, is a bit more somber: “He was a young man who had come out from New York, and I met him; a very intelligent boy who should have been a great playwright but got lost.”
12
Relying on the testimony of relatives, Bowman limns the Ruric pose: he was a “
blond, bearded member of the
Malibu Beach crowd, taken to wearing ascot scarves.”
13
He apparently spent the next four years in Europe with his mother. The only record of his work in the European film industries is shared credit for the script to
Jericho
(1937), a British drama starring Paul Robeson that was released in the U.S. as
Dark Sands
. Sims then returned to make another splash in Tinseltown.

His accomplishments of note during this second Hollywood period are the story for
Twelve Crowded Hours
(1938), which he hammered out with Garrett Fort—an adherent of Meher Baba whose life would end in suicide at a Los Angeles hotel in 1945—and script work on
Grand Central Murder
(1942), a giddy maze of flashbacks that highlights his facility with form. He also contributed to the adaptation of Ayn Rand’s
Night of January 16th
(1941).