Paul Cain goes DAB Radio

Today's pulp fiction story on Radio 7's This is Pulp Fiction series comes from Paul Cain, stalewart of Black Mask Magazine - The programme is available on the listen again site of by subscription for those outside the UK. The story in question - Black.

Paul Cain arrived at Black Mask in 1932, when the magazine neared its zenith. He was born George Sims in Iowa in 1902, but he wrote as "Paul Cain" and scripted movies as "Peter Ruric." He grew up on the grim side of Chicago and claimed to have "traveled extensively in Central and South America, the West Indies, Europe, Northern Africa and the Near East, been a bosun's mate on tramps, a … Dada painter [and] a professional gambler." ¹ Almost no objective biographical information exists about the twenty-nine years of his life before he submitted his first hard-boiled story to "Cap" Shaw in 1932. "Fast One" featured the quick-shooting gambler Gerry Kells, a tough guy paradigm. Three more Kells stories formed the basis of the novel Fast One, a landmark hard-boiled novel. Cain "picks up his literary scalpel and [cuts] away conjunctions as if they were bad merchandise," wrote novelist Irvin Faust. "He digs into the page with a hard sentence: simple, declarative, exact." "Cap" Shaw called him "an aesthete in taste and ambition. Allied with his aesthetic moods is a grim sense of realism in its hardest texture." Cain himself wrote that he liked "Mercedes motor cars, peanut butter… Scotch whiskey, some of the paintings of [de] Chirico, gardenias, vegetables and sour cream, [and Greta] Garbo." ²