Paul Cain is a bit of an enigma, a terrific writer who published only one novel and some short stories before pretty much disappearing from print and from history. (At least, easily uncovered history.) His one novel, FAST ONE, is as hardboiled as anything I've ever read. It reminds me a good deal of Dashiell Hammett's classic RED HARVEST, inasmuch as it has a central figure pitting various groups of nasty folk against each other. The one drawback I have with the book is that the plethora of characters are not well separated one from another, descriptively, and I had a hard time keeping them separate in my mind. Only reaching midway through the book could I picture an individual whenever I saw a character's name. This quibble aside, FAST ONE is a dark and dirty crime novel with great writing and a compelling story. ( )

Fast One by Paul Cain is a very dark and violent gangster story. It has become known as the “most hard-boiled novel of the 1930s and for the mystery surrounding the actual identity of the author. Paul Cain’s real name was allegedly George Carrol Sims, he worked in Hollywood as a screen writer under the name of Peter Ruric. He was notoriously closed mouth about his origins.

As for the book, I was not a fan. I found the story rather choppy and the writing was nowhere near the level of his contemporaries like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The main character in this story, Gerry Kells has apparently decided that he should be the kingpin of the gangster world in L. A. The plot is full of double-crosses, guns and fists, loose women and gambling money. This story moves quickly, but mostly from one scene of violence to another. There is very little character development, just one complication after another for Kells. In fact, it was often difficult to distinguish one character from another as they tended to all sound the same.

While Fast One has a place in history as a key work in the development of the hard-boiled crime novel, I personally require more finesse in the plotting, more development of the characters, and a little more subtlety in my action scenes. ( )

Hammett's Continental Op stories have a fellow detective who the narrator describes as speaking like a telegraph. Cain's Fast One pretty much reads like a telegraph. Everything has been squeezed out. Not an added piece of character or description anywhere. A Reader's Digest condensation would be impossible. The final sentence was effective however. ( )

I am a huge fan of classic hard-boiled fiction, but damn, this is just impenetrable, full of passages like this:

--"Listen. Doc went to Perry's to see me...What for? I was with Jack Rose being propositioned to come in with him and Doc, on the Joanna. They're evidently figuring Fay and Hesse to make things tough and wanted me for a flash."--

and

--"Rose called Eddie O'Donnell and me after you left him this afternoon. He said Dave Perry had called while you were there - told him that Doc was at the joint in Hollywood waiting for you...Perry knew Rose was going to have Doc bumped - an' he knew Rose wanted to frame it for you...It looked like a good play."--

Hello, come again? Since there are no characters in this novel, only ciphers with names attached, all of this is literally impossible to follow. Although written in apparently grammatical English sentences, it might as well be Basque for all the sense one can make of it. "Fast One" has an abstract quality that some readers have championed, but I have not been able to get into it.

UPDATE: The bleak final chapter is memorable and gooses the rating a half-point. ( )

ho hum...can't get through it ( )