James Cain, a native to Maryland, wrote more than 20 novels and short story collections and either worked on or birthed a handful of movies. He made his mark with his first two major fictions that created a kind of everyone’s in danger of losing their soul type of literature we now cram under the label of noir.
Cain hated genre labels.
Those two novels –The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) – are the subject of this two-hour class, timed to coincide with a production of Double Indemnity at the Roundhouse Theatre in Bethesda May 30-June 24.
With a slight broadening of focus, we could have added Cain’s great Mildred Pierce (1941), a mother-daughter cautionary horror story that in its own way is a feminist literature landmark, or some of his more controversial novels that brush against things like incest, but a double shot of two novels both dealing with love, homicide and second chances feels fiercely apt.
Come get “thrown off the hay wagon” and land in the world of James Cain.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
James Grady’s first novel, published when he was 24, became the Robert Redford movie Three Days Of The Condor in 1975. Since then, Grady has worked as a U.S. Senate aide, an investigative reporter for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, and a cultural columnist for AOL’s PoliticsDaily.com. He has also freelanced for The New Republic, The Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine, written for film icons like John Woo and Stephen Cannell, and published more than a dozen other novels and as many short stories, including appearances in D.C. Noir and D.C. Noir 2 – The Classics. France awarded Grady its Grand Prix du Roman Noir, Italy gave him its Raymond Chandler medal, and Japan gave Grady’s last novel, Mad Dogs, its Baku Misu award for literature.
