“You could say that you saw a car trailing my agent. You were afraid it contained a newspaperman or perhaps even gangsters who may have found out the identity of the man carrying the ransom. You hailed the car and it started off. You chased it. You noticed it had no rear license plate...”
“I get you, Mr. Davenport. In other words, I take the merry razz from the boys and likely a hot calling-down from the chief.”
“You like Cort, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“And your shoulders are broad, Captain.”
MacBride cracked a hard tight grin. His voice was low, saying: “Okey. I’ll be the goat then: But just let somebody try riding me! Just let them!”
Paul Cain
(1902–1966)
A great deal of mystery surrounds the life of Paul Cain (George Carrol Sims), including who, precisely, he was and what he did during large slices of his life. He seems to have been one of a kind, a man congenitally at odds with normality. Only very recently has it been established that his birth name was Sims and not Ruric, the latter a surname he used throughout his career. He was George Ruric when he worked as a production assistant on Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925) and Peter Ruric when he was a successful screenwriter from the late 1930s into the 1940s. As Paul Cain, he wrote almost solely for Black Mask. Of seventeen stories for Black Mask, five were “cannibalized” into his only novel, the extraordinary Fast One (1933), and seven were collected into Seven Slayers (1946).
Cain claimed to have led a colorful, even rackety existence, roaming the globe (South America, North Africa, the Near East, points north, east, south, and west) and posing, among other things, as a tramp-steamer boatswain’s mate, a Dadaist painter, and a professional gambler. The last disguise was most likely a true part of Cain’s résumé, since, as William F. Nolan has pointed out, the gambling scenes in Fast One were clearly written by someone who had been there.
Fast One was considered by the modern critic E. R. Hagemann to be “one of the toughest... and most brutal gangster stories ever written.” The anonymous reviewer for the New York Times Book Review described it as “a ceaseless welter of bloodshed and frenzy, a sustained bedlam of killing and fiendishness.” While Hagemann’s view is clearly positive and the Times critic’s negative, both comments seem to be apt. Like all great works of art, Fast One keeps being rediscovered and lauded, worthy of every word of praise that has been showered on it.
“Trouble-Chaser” is as mean and lean as anything Cain ever wrote; it is written in a stripped-down prose style that makes the understatement of Ernest Hemingway look flowery and the minimalism of Andrew Vachss seem somehow overblown. It has not been reprinted anywhere since its first appearance in Black Mask more than sixty years ago.
J. A.
Trouble-Chaser
(1934)
Mae lived at the Mara Apartments on Rossmore. It was about nine o’clock when I got there and the party hadn’t got going. I mean by that that nobody was falling down and nobody had been smacked over the skull with a bottle. There were six or seven people there besides Mae and Tony I didn’t know any of them, which was just as well. Tony opened the door, and made a pass at introducing me, and Mae came in from the kitchen and we went into a big clinch. She was demonstrative that way when she had two or three fifths of gin under her belt, whoever it might be.
Tony fixed me a drink. I took it because I knew better than to argue about a thing like that; I carried it around with me most of the time I was there and when anybody would ask me if I wanted a drink I’d show them the full glass.
Tony was Italian — from Genoa I think. He was very dark and slim, with shiny blue-black hair, bright black eyes, a swell smile. I’d known him for five or six years — I knew him back in New York when he was trying to build up a bottle business around the Grant Hotel. We’d never been particularly friendly but we always liked each other well enough. When he came to California he looked me up and I got him a job running case-stuff for Eddie Garda. I introduced Tony to Mae Jackman when she was a class C extra-girl and not doing so well at it. They’d been living together for about a year. Tony was in business for himself and doing well enough to live at the Mara. Mae still worked in pictures occasionally and that helped.
Mae jockeyed me out into the kitchen as soon as she could. She leaned against the sink and sucked up most of a glass of gin and ginger ale and whispered dramatically: “We’ve got to get rid of Tony.”
I am not the most patient person in the world, with drunks. I looked at her with what I hoped would penetrate her gin haze as an extremely disgusted expression.
She went on hurriedly in the stage whisper: “I mean for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you an’ I don’t want him busting in.” She finished her drink and then with a very wise and meaning look, said, Wait, and coasted back into the living-room.
I poured the gin in my glass into the sink and filled the glass with ginger ale and ice.
She came back in a minute. “I sent him up to Cora’s to get some ice,” she said. Cora was Mae’s side-kick; she lived upstairs.
Mae steered me through the short corridor into the bedroom and closed the door behind us. She went to the dresser and dug around in the bottom drawer for a minute and came up with a folded piece of yellow paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it and held it under the light at the head of the bed; it was Louis L. Steinlen’s personal check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Steinlen was the executive head of the Astra Motion Picture Company.
I said: “That’s swell, Mae.” I handed the check back to her and she held it with the light shining down on it and looked at it and then looked up at me.
“It’s swell,” she said — “an’ it’s going to be a lot sweller.”
She smiled and her face lost its set drunken look for a moment. She was a very pretty girl and when she smiled she was almost beautiful.
I said: “So what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic about staying in the bedroom with her because Tony might come back sooner than she expected and he was a long way from being stone sober — I didn’t want him to get any trick ideas.
Mae kept on smiling at me. She said: “So this is the amount” — she bobbed her head at the check — “of your cut for helping me make a deal with Steinlen.”
I had a faint idea of what she was getting at, but not enough to help much. I said: “What the hell are you talking about?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to sell Steinlen his two-bit check for twenty-five grand,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I felt like laughing but I didn’t... I waited.
“This little piece of paper,” she went on, “is worth its weight in radium.” She glanced down fondly at the check, then back up at me. She was not smiling any more. “Steinlen has been chasing me for months. Last week-end Tony went up to Frisco on business — I went to Arrowhead with Steinlen — on business.” She smiled again, slowly. She held the check in one hand and whipped the index finger of her other hand with it. “This is a little token of the deal.”