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Noir Knights: Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Easy Rawlins, Matt Scudder
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Mildred Pierce
Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter.
Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
James Mallahan Cain (1892–1977) worked as a reporter during World War I and was managing editor at the New Yorker before going to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. His novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, became film noir classics. In 1974, he was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Christine Williams is a singer and actor based in Ashland, Oregon. Her performance credits include productions at regional theaters and on concert stages across the country and around the world, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Barbican Centre in London to the Aspen Music Festival and the Grotowski Institute in Poland.
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Reviews
“A novel that, once begun, will almost surely be read to the end…it reflects no codes, no restrictions, and none but the primordial necessities. It is a bath in sensation.”
“This novel, by the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, is compounded of shrewdness, artifice, a brittle vivacity and a commanding of psychological penetration. It sports a toughness of sentiment that is perhaps not quite so modish as it was, and yet at the same time it performs feats of surgical analysis that are undeniably impressive…It is all cleverly done, Mr.Cain’s air of hard detachment steadily gaining in power in the somewhat gruesome domestic scenes of the closing pages.”
“The drugstore-library sensationalism that still overhangs Cain’s work does not stop him from being one of the most readable storytellers in the U.S.”
“[Mildred Pierce] take[s] on new life under Williams’ direction…[the story] flourishes under her steady, patient, ever-so-slightly melancholic gaze. Williams’ reading…amplifies our sense of Cain’s heroine as an abandoned woman who finds her own way, on her own terms.”
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