Cain was one of those writers who first amazed and delighted me when I was old enough to start looking around and seeing what was being done in American literature. Steinbeck, Farrell, Saroyan, Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe were some of the others. But Cain—momentum was something he had a patent on. Or maybe acceleration is the word. Picking up a Cain novel was like climbing into a car with one of those Superstockers who is up to forty by the time your right leg is in the door. Today, twenty years later, I have read The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce again … and I am still amazed and delighted … partly because I can now see how complex Cain's famous "fast-paced," "hard-boiled" technique really is….

Cain was a bit notorious in the 1930's and 1940's as a novelist of "sex and violence." I can...