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"I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth."

Oh, noir. Such a shitty kisser.

At just over 100 pages, this is a night's work, and it hits all the buttons beautifully. Murder, passion, weird sex, purpleness...it's all here. "I hauled off and hit her in the eye as hard as I could," says our hero; "She went down. She was right down there at my feet, her eyes shining, her breasts trembling." Whee!

Camus called this 1934 novella an influence on The Stranger, which actually does make (some) sense. (Both are nihilistic, but The Stranger is better because it's more curious about what that means.) And there's some debate over how seriously one should take James Cain's work. Tom Wolfe said that "Nobody has quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, not even Raymond Chandler.� That all seems a bit much for me; I was highly entertained by this book, but I don't see that it's any better than, say, The Killer Inside Me. But, I mean, look:

We're just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren't the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It's a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That's what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.

Cain has never made any effort to explain why Frank and Cora fall so hard for each other; in the world of noir, passion is something that just happens to you, like hydroplaning. It's a bit of an adolescent world - even silly, if you're not feeling charitable. But there's something awfully satisfying about noir. It taps into something. I wouldn't want to do without it.