If you have the courage, take a look this summer at [Cain x 3]…. Courage is needed because of an entire generation of tough-guy writers—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, B. Traven, Horace McCoy and others of the Southern California school—James M. Cain is possessed of the most brutal, elemental, and intrinsically pessimistic view of human events and possibilities. Only another Californian, Robinson Jeffers, working up the coast at Big Sur and in another genre, narrative poetry, matches Cain's abysmal bleakness.

Something happened in Southern California during the 1930s. Some new vision of evil rushed in upon the American consciousness….

It was a demicivilization of expatriates, and James M. Cain was part of it, brought there, like Fitzgerald and Faulkner, to write for the movies…. Yet Cain looked around himself, noted what he saw, and in 1934, after more than a decade of trying to write fiction, published The Postman...