Afbeelding auteur

Paul Cain (1) (1902–1966)

Auteur van Fast One

Voor andere auteurs genaamd Paul Cain, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.

19+ Werken 357 Leden 12 Besprekingen Favoriet van 1 leden

Werken van Paul Cain

Fast One (1933) 185 exemplaren
Seven Slayers (1950) 93 exemplaren
Pigeon Blood (2013) 5 exemplaren
Paul Cain: The Complete Stories (2013) 4 exemplaren
One Two Three 2 exemplaren
Black (2008) 2 exemplaren
Parlor Trick 2 exemplaren
Trouble-chaser 2 exemplaren
Pineapple 1 exemplaar
Null auf Hundert. (1996) 1 exemplaar
Murder In Blue 1 exemplaar
Red 71 1 exemplaar
Black Lizard 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007) — Medewerker — 531 exemplaren
The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (1996) — Medewerker — 234 exemplaren
Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (1995) — Medewerker — 183 exemplaren
Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics (2010) — Medewerker — 42 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Officiële naam
Sims, George Carroll
Pseudoniemen en naamsvarianten
Ruric, Peter
Geboortedatum
1902-05-30
Overlijdensdatum
1966-06-23
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
USA
Geboorteplaats
Iowa, USA
Woonplaatsen
Hollywood, California, USA
Majorca, Spain
Beroepen
Novelist
screenwriter
Relaties
Michael, Gertrude (girlfriend)

Leden

Besprekingen

Paul Cain is a bit of an enigma, a terrific writer who published only one novel and some short stories before pretty much disappearing from print and from history. (At least, easily uncovered history.) His one novel, FAST ONE, is as hardboiled as anything I've ever read. It reminds me a good deal of Dashiell Hammett's classic RED HARVEST, inasmuch as it has a central figure pitting various groups of nasty folk against each other. The one drawback I have with the book is that the plethora of characters are not well separated one from another, descriptively, and I had a hard time keeping them separate in my mind. Only reaching midway through the book could I picture an individual whenever I saw a character's name. This quibble aside, FAST ONE is a dark and dirty crime novel with great writing and a compelling story.… (meer)
 
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jumblejim | 6 andere besprekingen | Aug 26, 2023 |
Fast One by Paul Cain is a very dark and violent gangster story. It has become known as the “most hard-boiled novel of the 1930s and for the mystery surrounding the actual identity of the author. Paul Cain’s real name was allegedly George Carrol Sims, he worked in Hollywood as a screen writer under the name of Peter Ruric. He was notoriously closed mouth about his origins.

As for the book, I was not a fan. I found the story rather choppy and the writing was nowhere near the level of his contemporaries like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The main character in this story, Gerry Kells has apparently decided that he should be the kingpin of the gangster world in L. A. The plot is full of double-crosses, guns and fists, loose women and gambling money. This story moves quickly, but mostly from one scene of violence to another. There is very little character development, just one complication after another for Kells. In fact, it was often difficult to distinguish one character from another as they tended to all sound the same.

While Fast One has a place in history as a key work in the development of the hard-boiled crime novel, I personally require more finesse in the plotting, more development of the characters, and a little more subtlety in my action scenes.
… (meer)
 
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DeltaQueen50 | 6 andere besprekingen | Jan 16, 2020 |
Hammett's Continental Op stories have a fellow detective who the narrator describes as speaking like a telegraph. Cain's Fast One pretty much reads like a telegraph. Everything has been squeezed out. Not an added piece of character or description anywhere. A Reader's Digest condensation would be impossible. The final sentence was effective however.
 
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jameshold | 6 andere besprekingen | Jul 22, 2017 |
Today Paul Cain is remembered for his lone novel Fast One, which--more than a decade after its publication--served as a model for the burgeoning subgenre of noir (and for which Raymond Chandler expressed a cockeyed admiration). It was a monochromatic book, filled with characters whose almost doltish insistence on getting themselves killed made it impossible for me to take seriously, but Fast One was not entirely representative of Cain's work. It sounds good to be dubbed "ultra-hardboiled" or "the hardest of the hardboiled," but at bottom that's a puerile distinction...and, as far as Cain is concerned, an imprecise one. In these stories he happily made use of all the stereotypical variants of the '30s pulp detective, from the independently wealthy eccentric who solves crimes as a lark to the screwy reporter who works hand in hand with the PI or the cops. In this way, Cain bore a much closer resemblance to his peers than all the breathlessly smitten reviewers of his novel would have you believe.

The stories vary in quality: a bleak vignette called "Parlor Trick" is reminiscent of Fast One, while "Murder in Blue" (the tale of an amiable Hollywood stuntman turned detective/bodyguard/con artist who gets in way over his head) is enlivened by touches of whimsy and even human warmth. My favorite is "One, Two, Three," a fun murder caper in which Cain managed to find humor in one of his recurring themes, that of the beautiful but treacherous woman. Seven Slayers doesn't include his best story, "Trouble Chaser," but you can find that one in Pronzini & Adrian's Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories.

Like everyone who followed in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett (until Raymond Chandler, whose psychologically mature writing initiated a sea change in the genre), Paul Cain was trying to outdo Hammett's slick and seemingly effortless minimalism. He didn't succeed--he wasn't a good enough writer for that--but he had his moments.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
Jonathan_M | 2 andere besprekingen | Jun 10, 2017 |

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Statistieken

Werken
19
Ook door
5
Leden
357
Populariteit
#67,136
Waardering
3.8
Besprekingen
12
ISBNs
47
Talen
4
Favoriet
1

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