NEWS: David Madden's new book on James M. Cain
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James M. Cain: Hard-Boiled Mythmaker
David Madden and Kristopher Mecholsky
Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2011

   How can you not like Mildred Pierce? 
Whether she’s Kate Winslet or Joan Crawford or James M. Cain’s original, Mildred models an appealing blend of economic ambition, motherhood, and romance betrayed. With a new version of Mildred Pierce on HBO, and a recent article by Hilton Als in The New Yorker (3/28/11), reassessments are in order, not least because Cain himself was so attuned to economic hard times like our own.
 David Madden championed Cain long before it was fashionable.  I have in hand my 1968 copy of his Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, which is dedicated  “To James M. Cain, twenty-minute egg of the hard-boiled writers.”  This collection of criticism is still important, for in Madden’s introduction he boldly set up Cain as a perspective on the world of Hemingway, Chandler, Hammett, Bellow, and McCoy.  That viewpoint made the constellation of literature taught on campus look quite different, even in 1968.
 Although the multi-talented Madden was principally a fiction writer (his fourth novel, The Suicide’s Wife, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) and director of the creative writing program at L.S.U., in his free moments he continued to champion Cain.  He wrote James M. Cain (1970) and Cain’s Craft (1985), and organized the first ever James M. Cain Conference, held at the unlikely venue of Baylor University amid the arcana of the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Collection.  I was there, and believe me, listening to Madden begin his paper by evoking an imaginary theater marquee and intoning “JAMES … M … CAIN” was, for some years, my definition of academic cognitive dissonance. (continue)

" L.A. – City of Sleuths "

William Marling's “L.A. - City of Sleuths” in the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles (2010).

The prototypical LA detective was invented in San Francisco by Dashiell Hammett. Whether his name was The Continental Op or Sam Spade, he was hard-boiled, with a blue-collar attitude, edgy repartee, and a close connection to his setting. Hammett used him to portray the city, its political corruption, its fog and docks and hills, its cab drivers and efficiency apartments. By 1925 the Op was already a working stiff who suffered for his drinking bouts. With a few changes, he became Sam Spade, the iconic hero of The Maltese Falcon (1930). (continue)

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NEWS: Bouchercom to Cleveland

The Bouchercon World Mystery Convention has been held annually in various cities since 1970 but has never been hosted in Ohio. The Bouchercon itself, and the Anthony Awards, which are announced at the conference, are named in honor of author, editor and mystery devotee, Anthony Boucher. The theme of the 2012 conference will be "Crime Fiction Rocks," with the opening ceremonies to be held at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. More info.