Books

HARD CASE:

The Enduring Influence of James M. Cain: How Cain’s work shifted the focus of crime fiction and passed on a legacy to new generations of authors. (Tom Milani, 5/12/25, Crime Reads)

When he got fed up with his job at The New Yorker, he finally accepted an offer from Paramount, believing that moving west would help him solidify his voice as an author. By 1931, Cain was indeed headed for Hollywood. Unlike some of the authors who preceded him there—Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al.—Cain had limited success as a fiction writer before he arrived, and so the charge of being a sellout didn’t apply. In fact, the opposite occurred as his literary reputation began to expand, beginning with the short story “The Baby in the Icebox,” published in The American Mercury and then sold to Paramount.

With more confidence, Cain began writing a novel based loosely two news stories he’d read—one about a female gas station attendant who ended up killing her husband, the other about a woman and her lover who conspire to murder her husband before turning on each other afterwards. Because of its length (35,000 words) and perceived problems with the ending, the novel, titled “Bar-B-Que,” was conditionally accepted by Alfred A. Knopf. After considerable back-and-forth between Cain and the publisher, the book was finally published as is save for the title. “Bar-B-Que” became “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

Upon its release in 1934, Postman went—and there is no other word to better describe it—viral, with rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and best seller status for hardcover and paperback editions, along with adaptations for serial, stage, and screen.

Cain’s next project was an eight-part serial, its title suggested by Jim Geller, his agent, and inspired by his own experience in the insurance industry. Titled “Double Indemnity,” the story was rejected by Redbook but eventually bought by Liberty. Like Postman, Double Indemnity went viral, if in a different way: people lined up to purchase the next issue of Liberty as soon as it was out.

HOGWARTS 61 REVISITED:

Kierkegaarry Potter: Fear and Rowling (Adam Roberts, May 08, 2025, Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion)

It’s the story of Abraham and Isaac from Isaac’s perspective; and it answers the question ‘but why must we die at the hands of the nom-de-la-mort Voldemort?’ with: because there is a little piece of this mort already inside your soul. But it does so in order to twist a surprise existential short-circuit out of the encounter: death ends up destroying not us but the shard of death inside us. Eucatastrophe!

This isn’t what Dumbledore thinks will happen, of course. It’s clear he believed that Harry would die. When his shade meets Harry after the event, he describes himself as a ‘master of Death’. ‘Was I better, ultimately, than Voldemort?’ he asks, and the question is not a rhetorical one. ‘I too sought a way to conquer death, Harry.’

“Hallows, not Horcruxes.”

“Hallows,” murmured Dumbledore, “not Horcruxes. Precisely.” …

“Grindelwald was looking for them too?”

Dumbledore closed his eyes for a moment and nodded.

“It was the thing, above all, that drew us together,” he said quietly. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession.”
[Deathly Hallows, ch. 35]

All the twists and turns of the seven novels, all the ‘Snape’s a baddie! no he’s a goodie! wrong, he’s a baddie! oh, final reveal, he’s a goodie!’ back and forth, they all resolve themselves into these three fundamentally Kiekegaardian problems. Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical in the Potterverse? On what grounds might it operate? Voldemort, and Grindelwald, and young Albus all suspended the ethical in search of a particular telos: overcoming death. That led to great suffering: in Kierkegaardian terms, a tragic, rather than Abarahamic, outcome. But to continue with Kierkegaard’s problemata: how does the specific suspension of the ethical provision not to sacrifice Harry Potter merit any more suspension than those earlier experiments? Voldemort dispenses with the ethical for purely selfish reasons: that he himself might not die. Snape is prepared to do the same for less selfish reasons: to save the life of the woman he loves. But Dumbledore’s rebuke to him on this ground carries meaningful ethical force: “You do not care, then, about the deaths of her husband and child? They can die, as long as you have what you want?” Snape is abashed by this, and quite right too. So what about Dumbledore’s reasons for doing what he does? That’s trickier to justify, and trickier even to identify. The answer is to be found in the eucatastrophic survival of Harry himself, just as, in the Genesis story, Abraham’s faith is only retrospectively justified by the intervention of the angel, staying his hand. Could we say: the thing that justifies Dumbledore’s secret scheme literally to send Harry Potter to his death is that he is, in a Kiekegaardian sense, a knight of faith?

THE DEBT TO YOUTH:

Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later: On the Decades-Long Creative Process Behind His Most Successful Novel (Kazuo Ishiguro, May 5, 2025, LitHub)

[I]n the late 1990s, I belatedly noticed I was no longer a “young writer”—that there was a distinct and exciting new generation emerging in Britain, typically fifteen or so years younger than me. Some of these authors I read and admired from a distance. Others became friends.

For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.

And in the autumn of 2000, during a coast-to-coast U.S. book tour, my itinerary intersected three times with that of a young English author promoting his first novel. The novel was Ghostwritten and his name was David Mitchell—both at that point unknown to me. We found ourselves sitting in late-night lounges of hotels in the American Midwest, chilling after our respective events, competing to identify tunes the cocktail pianist was playing for us.

Alongside chat about Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I noted how he mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosemary Sutcliff, the recent Matrix movie, H.P. Lovecraft, schlocky old ghost and horror stories, fantasy literature. On returning home I read Ghostwritten and realized I’d been communing with a monster talent (an assessment that became more or less universal when he published Cloud Atlas three years later).

My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me. They opened windows for me I’d not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.

Interesting that PD James too produced a great dystopian novel later in life.

PULSATIONS:

The Lion, the Wizard, and the Great Physician (Nina Maksimova, 4/15/25, Christianity Today)

I was five years old when my family immigrated from Russia to the United States, fleeing life-threatening antisemitism. From the safety of our new home, I pondered a question: Why, beneath the skin-flaying sorrow of the human story, could I sense in every capillary of my being the throbbing pulse of heartbreaking joy?

This was the question that kept me up reading, and the first fictional world where I began to glimpse answers was Narnia. Here was a story that persuasively imagined the necessity of friendship and courage in the face of hatred and terror––a story in which the heartbeat of joy beat louder. It emanated from Aslan the lion, who followed me home out of the wardrobe. He started accompanying me to kindergarten and playing tag with my friends at recess. He let me fall asleep nuzzling his mane, and the tenderness of his presence felt like déjà vu, like something I could almost recognize or a good dream I could almost remember.

One might argue I was simply recognizing C. S. Lewis’s allusions to the gospel story. But that was impossible. My family had inherited the Soviet Union’s atheism. When I met Aslan, I had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth,” never opened a Bible, never knowingly encountered Christianity.

Aslan stayed with me for the next two years until the premiere of the Fellowship of the Ring movie. My family went to see it, and the heartbeat of joy that had reverberated in Lewis’s Narnia now surged from the depths of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

It crescendoed with nearly unbearable resonance into a longing that pulled me toward Gandalf the wizard. When I watched him die, I was so upset that I begged my mom to read me the next book in the series, The Two Towers. There, Gandalf came back from the dead, transfigured with white light, and took Aslan’s place as my imaginary companion. He remained with me for the next ten years—until they turned dark, then dangerous, and I told him to go away.

I did so because, as a teenager, I encountered more and more evil, not only outside myself but also inside. I did not need to read children’s stories anymore to know that adults could shape-shift into monsters, that we were capable of any horror. Louder than that heartbeat of joy, I began to hear a hissing in my thoughts that demanded to know why I should be kind to my enemies when I could be cruel; why I should seek good when I could seek power, pleasure.

I had no answers, only the emotions Narnia and Middle Earth had inspired. So I stopped using my imagination to indulge in “childish” stories and started digging for answers in the nonfictional abysses of 20th-century Europe. I stopped talking to Gandalf and matriculated at Dartmouth College. My first professor was a Christian.

His lectures on 20th-century Europe dissected me. I imagined myself a citizen of the Third Reich and understood I could not stop its gears from grinding up blood and marrow. I could perhaps shelter my Jewish neighbors, but that would not halt the cattle trains headed to Auschwitz. If anything, I would be arrested and gassed myself, so all my logic ordered me to opt for self-preservation.

But I could still hear that joy from my childhood, pounding like the heartbeat of a dying bird.

AMUSING THE LAST MAN:

What Moby Dick Still Teaches Us (Andy Owen, 02/26/2025, Merion West)

The Children’s Commissioner for England recently released a report on the July, 2024 riots that followed the horrific murders of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The riots, which lasted almost a week and included racially-motivated attacks, arson, and looting were the largest incident of social unrest in England since 2011. In a series of interviews, the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, found that children who took part in the riots were primarily driven by curiosity and the “thrill of the moment” rather than far-right ideology and social media misinformation, the initial culprits blamed by the authorities.

De Souza’s report noted that poverty and a lack of opportunity in their communities also contributed to the rioters’ involvement. Human beings need more than the satisfaction of their base desires. They strive for status, belonging, and meaning. They can find these in the service of political parties, religious creeds, non-nation-state groups; in the pursuit of wealth and possessions; in the creation of art, music, and objects of value; in building a family or a network of friends; and in adventure and thrill-seeking. When other opportunities to achieve status, belonging, and meaning are limited, the risk that increasing numbers will turn to the thrill of violence and law breaking will increase. A 2018 study led by psychologist Birga Schumpe supports the report’s insights. While previous research linked people’s search for meaning with their willingness to use violence for a cause, Schumpe’s research suggests that the search for meaning is strongly associated with a need for excitement, which, in turn, was associated with greater support for violence.

I first read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick while working in counterterrorism for the British government. The story of how the narrator Ishmael becomes part of the vengeful hunt for the titular white whale onboard a New England whaling ship, provided more of a window into the minds and motivations of modern-day extremists than any contemporary book I could find.

LESS SOUND, PLEASE:

Do You Write, Mr. Faulkner? ( Ron Rash, Feb 7, 2025, Sporting Classics Daily)

This anecdote tells us much about Faulkner, a private man who disdained the attention of intellectuals and literary critics, preferring instead the company of simple, unassuming men who, as he once put it, were not “even very literate, let alone literary.” He was also a man who, as an accomplished hunter and outdoorsman, was much more comfortable in the silence and isolation of the wilderness than in the sound and fury of a city.

The “big woods,” as he called them, offered Faulkner an escape from the pressures of his art, a turbid personal life and, at least late in his life, fame. But the hunt and the wilderness were more than just an escape for Faulkner; they were also an inspiration for some of his greatest literary works.

“He taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward.” —Go Down, Moses, 1942

William Faulkner was probably destined to be a hunter and outdoorsman, for patience, self-discipline and an ability to work in solitude — the traits of both a writer and an outdoorsman, marked his character and temperament. These traits were developed amidst a family and society that made his interest in hunting and outdoors almost inevitable.