The Paul Cain Omnibus Read Online Free PDF Page B

necessary for him, I thought. His mind is not always clear, that is, he does not remember things and people at times. I feel very sad about it all and wished I could do more for him.
    I must close now—still have plenty to do, but I would like to see you again—maybe when Peter feels better and we all can meet.
    The wire itself, sent collect from Detroit and telegraphic by definition, is the work of a young man commencing a life of misadventures both on and off the page:
    MRS GEORGE C SIMS
    PHONE BLACK 3410 EAST 33RD AND UNIVERSITY AVE DESMOINES IOWA I AM GOING ABOARD EAGLE TEN BOUND FOR PORTSMOUTH CLOTHES HAVE NOT ARRIVED FROM CHICAGO I CANNOT DRAW CLOTHES HERE PLEASE SEND MONEY ENOUGH TO BUY A FEW CLOTHES AND PURCHASE NECCESSITIES [sic] FOR THREE WEEKS TRIP HAVE NOT BEEN PAID ABSOLUTELY BROKE PROBABLY LEAVE MONDAY LOVE TO ALL
    GEORGE C SIMS.
    There is an equal measure of exuberance and desperation in all of Sims’s writing. His telegram confirms, perhaps, what he had claimed in a letter to Shaw in 1944—that he’d spent a part of his youth in Chicago. But it appears to have been a small part.
    The U.S. Navy Reserve archives contain the record of one George Caryl Sims, who enlisted on June 7, 1917 and was to serve a stint until May 30, 1923. Sims—described as a ruddy, 5’ 8”, 131 lb., 17-year-old, with a 3” operation scar on his right abdomen—was discharged on January 17, 1921 for “inaptitude.” The record includes pleas for the boy’s release from Rep. C. C. Dowell, on the grounds that his mother is ill and needs his help, and responses from the office of then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt­. It is a less-than-stellar record of accomplishments—featuring several incidents of losing government property, disregard of orders, and disobedience. So began one of the strangest careers in hardboiled fiction.
    * * *
    Giving oneself over to a genre reveals more than one intends. Things swim up. A reader is tempted to mine the stories for autobiographical traces—and traces abound. As Myers and Collins point out, the boorish police dick Freberg in “Hunch” bears Sims’s mother’s maiden name, and wears a badge, like his father. 25 Make what you will, then, of Freberg’s fate:
    He caught Freberg by the throat with his right hand drew his left far back and snapped it suddenly forward; he could feel his hard fist sink into the soft pallor of Freberg’s face. Freberg crashed into the wall, sank slowly to the floor… . He glanced back at Freberg once, expressionlessly, then he went out and closed the door.
    The protagonist justifies Freberg’s beating with a cryptic suggestion: “I know where he buries the bodies.” Myers and Collins report that Fast One ’s Granquist shares a name with a family that resided in Des Moines. 26 But this kind of reading may take us nowhere.
    What erupts in the stories, regardless of names, are fits of misogyny, which are pronounced even in a  Black Mask  context. Women get their lights punched out for their own good: “‘Papa knows best, baby.’ He brought one arm up stiffly, swiftly from his side; the palm down, his fist clinched. His knuckles smacked sharply against her chin” ( Fast One ). Women wreak havoc in men’s lives and are punished gruesomely. In the late “Death Song” (January 1936), a dipsomaniac starlet is fatally bludgeoned with an “outsize vibrator.” It’s a joke, yes, but a tendentious one—disclosing something of what Sims may have been repressing. He wrote the story when Michael’s career was in serious peril, after a well-publicized car crash in San Bernardino and ahead of a mysterious hospitalization in New York for “toxic poisoning.”
    They may be playful experiments with form, but the Paul Cain stories are studded with laconic indications of buried trauma, resentment, and addiction.
    Then there’s “The Tasting Machine” (1949), the last piece of fiction Sims published. It appeared under the Peter Ruric