詹姆斯·凯恩

詹姆斯·凯恩（James Mallahan Cain，1892年7月1日—1977年10月27日），美国作家和记者。詹姆斯·凯恩通常与美国犯罪小说的硬汉形象连结在一起，也是其创造者之一。他的犯罪小说是许多成功电影的蓝本。

著作

《邮差总按两次铃》

《双重赔偿》

James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892 – October 27, 1977) was an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. He is widely regarded as a progenitor of the hardboiled school of American crime fiction.

His novels The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), Serenade (1937), Mildred Pierce (1941) and The Butterfly (1947) brought him critical acclaim and an immense popular readership in America and abroad.

Though Cain never delivered a successful Hollywood screenplay, several of his novels were made into highly regarded films, among them Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

In 1970, Cain became one of the Edgar Awards' Grand Masters. He continued to write and publish novels into his eighties. A number of his works were issued posthumously, including The Cocktail Waitress (2012).

Family background

Cain's paternal and maternal grandparents emigrated from Ireland and both families settled in New Haven, Connecticut during the early 1850s. Cain reported they were not agrarian refugees of the Great Famine of Ireland. His paternal grandfather P. W. Cain was an industrial worker who served as a superintendent for the Hartford Railroad. His wife, Mary (née Kelly), died in a typhoid fever outbreak in 1876. Cain's father, James W. "Jim" Cain, then 16 years-of-age, contracted but survived the illness. When P. W. Cain remarried, the disaffected Jim Cain gravitated to the home of the local Mallahan family, among whose daughters was Rose Mallahan, his future wife and mother to the famous author.

The elder James W. Cain matriculated to Yale University in 1880 at the age of 20 and taught evening school to pay for his tuition. A consummate Yale man—"handsome, articulate, intelligent and athletic"—he graduated in 1884 and became a professor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.

Cain's maternal grandmother, Brigid Ingoldsby Mallahan, was a descendant of Irish pirate William Ingoldsby, who had captured and ravaged the English colonial city of New York in 1691. His mother, Rose Mallahan—"small, pretty and very distinguished-looking"—had trained for seven years in her youth as a coloratura soprano and expected to pursue a career in opera after giving recitals in New Haven. She gave up these musical aspirations to marry her girlhood sweetheart Jim Cain in 1890. She gave birth to the first of her five children on July 1, 1892: James Mallahan Cain.

Early life

The six-year-old Cain entered grade school in Annapolis in 1898. An upbringing in a household with two highly literate parents contributed to the boy's "impeccable grammar" and his early enthusiasm for literature. Cain's father, then the head of the Annapolis School Board, indulged his son's request to skip two grades, from third to fifth. Though intellectually precocious, Cain later regretted the advancement, especially as his classmates entered puberty well ahead of him. The elder Cain's superior performance at St. John's College earned him the post of President of Washington College, at the time "a small non-denominational, co-educational school." In 1903, when Cain turned eleven, the family relocated to Chestertown, Maryland.

While living in Chestertown, Cain recalled encountering a garrulous bricklayer, Ike Newton, who introduced the young student to the "language of an uneducated but articulate person." Biographer Roy Hoopes traces Cain's fascination with common speech to this encounter, and compares it to the experiences of authors Jonathan Swift and Stephen Crane. Cain credited Newton's "vulgate" as instrumental to the development of his narrative style as a novelist. By the age of 12, Cain was a "voracious" reader and familiar with the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, William Thackeray, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexandre Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Cain was granted permission to take preparatory classes at Washington College, where he took courses with youths four years his senior.