Wednesday, May 24, 2006
 
Book Report: Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction by James M. Cain (1981)
I bought this book for $1.00 at the Greater St. Louis Book Fair because, as some of you know, I'll soon need to know when it's appropriate to place your baby in the icebox. After all, my beautiful wife is reading a number of parenting books; why shouldn't I pitch in?

Imagine my feigned surprise when I discovered that this book was not actual book about child care, but rather a collection of short pieces by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity!

As its title indicates, this book collects a number of short pieces from Cain, including a number of the bucolic "dialogs" he wrote in his early career as well as some of the grittier crime fiction he wrote for some serious money.

I enjoyed the book. The early pieces reminded me of Franz Kafka in that they're more slice-of-lifeish than anything earth-shattering, as though they were written as fictional smalltalk than I'm accustomed. Still I appreciated their language more than Kafka's.

The crime fiction portions were more pedestrian pulp, but that's what I handed over the dollar for. Enjoyable, and slightly unrealistic crimes, but set in the thirties and fourties, so they provide small glimpses into the past as well as into lurid crimes.

And in case it ever comes up, the time to put a baby in the icebox is if your husband has unleashed a hungry tiger into your house to kill you and you're holding the tiger off with a flaming brand which will inadvertently set fire to the house. As soon as I finish this review, I'm going to scan the indexes of some of Heather's parenting books to see if this holds as true in the 21st century as it did in the 1930s.

Books mentioned in this review:

 

- posted by Brian J. @ 9:41 PM
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