Over the years, I've looked at advice from famous authors as to how to begin a novel. Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, etc.) said "Never begin a story with the weather," and somewhere I read "start with an action sequence." Do you remember Snoopy on top of his dog house with a typewriter: "It was a dark and stormy night..."?

Of course, with that knowledge, I've since paid attention to how novels begin. Most of the good ones I've read do begin with action - a car chase, a murder, some intrigue - and then the author spends the rest of the book filling in the blanks, we hope.

The other day I picked up "Cloud Nine" by James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice - all big successes in the 1940s), written in the late 1960s when he was 75 years old. I don't know which of James Cain's earlier books I've read, if any. I have seen the movies of course, but we all know that's not the same. His usual themes included adultery, murder, prostitution, latent homosexuality, and greed, and we hit on some of that in Cloud Nine. But at least it had a happy ending.



And here is how it started:

"I first met her, this girl that I married a few days later, and that the papers have crucified under the pretense of glorification, on a Friday morning in June, on the parking lot by the Patuxent Building, that my office is in. It was around 9:30, and I was late getting in, on account of a call I had, from the buyer I'd lined up for a house I'd signed on to sell, who had gone away unexpectedly and wired me to stand by. So I did, he called, and we closed, without even much of a haggle over the $65,000 I asked. As you can imagine, I was feeling pretty good, and whistled as I parked."

Whew! I don't know if I've ever read a paragraph with so many commas. I've known people who talk like this, packing too much information into a couple of breaths, but have not seen it captured in works of fiction. As you probably know, good dialog in a novel makes or breaks it. Fortunately, the rest of the novel had shorter sentences, though not terse by any means. Or maybe I was accustomed to the style and didn't notice. I'll say this for it: the writing style of the first paragraph was so intriguing it carried me along until I was caught up in the story.

The tale is about a 30 year-old Maryland real estate developer who marries a teenaged girl who was impregnated by his sleazy half-brother as a result of a date rape. He pays an allowance to an older lady who owns some land he covets for a real estate development, considering it an investment because she will leave it to him in her will. But then she changed her will.



I was unprepared for the oddness of this story. Someone said James Cain wrote the 'pure novel' and Cain said if by pure novel he meant one "whose point is developed from the narrative itself, rather than from some commentary on the social theme or morality of the characters or economic or political aesthetic preachment, if that is what you mean, you hit my objective directly..." Of course, reading the book, I wasn't analyzing it and wondering Where is the social theme? I was just thinking Whoever wrote this was one strange dude - who thinks like this?

Now I want to read some more of his work so I can make comparisons between this later in life book and his earlier ones. One of his big successes, of which I hadn't heard was "Past All Dishonor." It is a period piece set in the days after the Civil War, about a young ex-Confederate spy who falls in love with, and is loved by, a Virginia City prostitute who can, for $10, be had by any man in town - except the hero.