Three by Cain - Serenade - Love's Lovely Counterfeit - The Butterfly - James M Cain.epub

All three books are written with an enduring view of the dark corners of the American psyche. Cain hammered high art out of the crude matter of betrayal, bloodshed, and perversity.

Serenade
Serenade is the story of the eternal triangle - with a difference. John Howard Sharp is an American opera singer down on his luck, having just bombed in Rigoletto in Mexico City when he first encounters the beautiful Mexican-Indian prostitute called Juana. Miraculously, she offers him the chance to rebuild his career in Hollywood and New York but then Winston Hawes, the young, rich and well-connected conductor who had first launched Sharp, comes back into his life with terrible consequences.

Love's Lovely Counterfeit
Lake City - an imaginary mid Western town after the prohibition, the gangsters have the police and politicians under their thumb and can act with impunity from a downtown hotel.
Enter two young idealists - one man thinking he can escape the consequences of his bad decision of hooking up with a crime lord and one woman thinking that she can change things for the better.

The Butterfly
The Butterfly by James M. Cain was first published in 1946. It takes place among the hills and hollers of West Virginia coal country. Cain uses his favorite form of narration, the first person confessional, in relating this unusual tale of deceit, incest and murder.

Jess Tyler is a church going mountain man. One day out of the blue, his estranged daughter, Kady, shows up at his cabin and starts throwing herself at him in a most undaughterly way. At least that's the way Jess tells it. Cain leaves a few hints that Jess may not be 100% accurate as a narrator. For example, he claims to be a God fearing teetotaler. Yet he quickly shows himself to be a seasoned expert when it comes to constructing and operating a commercial still.

About the Author
James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for The Cross of Lorraine, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literay career that included a professorship at St. John’s College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain’s famous first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain’s other novels, Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.