Paul Cain: The Paul Cain Omnibus

“555” originally appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly , 14 December 1935. Copyright © 1935 by The Red Star News Company. Copyright renewed 1963 and assigned to Argosy Communication, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.

“Death Song” originally appeared in Black Mask , Volume 18, #11, January, 1936. © 1936 by Pro-Distributors, Inc.; copyright renewed 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission Keith Alan Deutsch proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

“Pineapple” originally appeared in Black Mask , Volume 19, #1, March 1936. © 1936 by Pro-Distributors, Inc.; copyright renewed 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission Keith Alan Deutsch proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

“Sockdolager” originally appeared in Star Detective , Volume 1 #1, April, 1936. © 1936 by Red Star News, The Frank A. Munsey Company. © 1953 renewed by Popular Publications, Inc. successor-in-interest to the Frank A Munsey Company. Reprinted in Tales from The Black Mask Morgue Series by permission of Keith Alan Deutsch proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

“Dutch Treat” originally appeared in Black Mask , Volume 19 #10, December, 1936. © 1936 by Pro-Distributors, Inc.; copyright renewed 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission Keith Alan Deutsch proprietor and conservator of the respective copyrights, and successor-in-interest to Popular Publications, Inc.

“The Tasting Machine” originally appeared in two parts, Gourmet Magazine , November 1949 and December 1949.

Joseph Shaw, discarded introduction to The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), box 5, folder 6, of the Joseph T. Shaw Papers (2052), UCLA’s Young Research Library. Quoted more extensively in E. R. Hagemann, “Introducing Paul Cain and His Fast One: A Forgotten Hard-Boiled Writer, a Forgotten Gangster Novel,” Armchair Detective 12, no. 1 (January 1979): 75.

William Brandon, “Back in the Old Black Mask ,” The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 707.

Ibid., 708.

Joseph Shaw, “Greed, Crime, and Politics,” Black Mask (March 1931), 9. Quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 46.

Irvin Faust, “Afterword,” in Fast One (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 311.

See Lynn F. Myers, Jr. and Max Allan Collins, “Chasing Shadows: The Life of Paul Cain,” in The Complete Slayers (Lakewood, CO: Centipede Press, 2011), 13–17, for information on Sims’s ancestry and early childhood.

Myers and Collins, 17; Los Angeles City Directory (1923), 2810.

Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932), 218.

Los Angeles City Directory , 2810.

Myrna Loy and James Kotsilibas-Davis, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming (New York: Knopf, 1987), 42. See also Larry Carr, “Myrna Loy,” in More Fabulous Faces: The Evolution and Metamorphosis of Dolores Del Rio, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 55.

Tom Weaver, “Shirley Ulmer,” in I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001), 233.

Peter Bogdanovich, “Edgar G. Ulmer,” in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Knopf, 1997), 575.

David A. Bowman, “Cold Trail: The Life of Paul Cain,” in Fast One (Berkeley, CA: Black Lizard, 1987), vii. See also Dennis Fischer, “The Black Cat,” in Boris Karloff , ed. Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla (Baltimore: Midnight Marquee, 1996), 94–95.

Bowman, viii.

Ibid.

Myers and Collins, 29–30.

Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 727. See also ibid., 707.

Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. Parts 3–4: Dramas and Works Prepared for Oral Delivery , vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Library of Congress, Copyright Office, 1947), 206; Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series. Part 2: Periodicals , vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Copyright Office, Library of Congress, 1949), 76.

Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), 4.

Idem, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in What are Masterpieces (Los Angeles, CA: The Conference Press, 1940), 87.

Marcel Duhamel, Raconte pas ta vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), 549-50. This episode is also discussed in Peter Gunn, “Paul Cain, 1902–1966,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 306: American Mystery and Detective Writers , ed. George Parker Anderson (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2005), 42.

Ibid., 549.

Ibid., 550.

Bowman, x.

Myers and Collins, 28.

Ibid., 22.

The Dictionary defines Sockdolager as “That which ends or settles a matter, as a decisive blow.”