![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Cain estate, he said, “was wonderful to work with.” Or sometimes you will find something very good, and the author’s estate will say, ‘No, we want to keep it unpublished.’” Either this unfamiliar thing you’re reading isn’t finished, or it’s something everyone else on the planet knows about, but it was published under a different title. “And 99% of the time, I end up disappointed. “I try to act like a prosecutor,” he said. “’Blackmail’ starts out as hard-boiled,” Skenazy said, “but it pretty quickly turns soft-boiled.” Though Skenazy is happy that Cain’s fans will have the rare opportunity to enjoy a new story by the author, in his view, the ending veers into sentimentality. Unlike Gulli, Skenazy prefers Cain’s darker writing, stories that he described as featuring “lower-class losers who are trying to figure out how to play the game though they don’t even know what the rules are.” “So the whole business of the blind man going to the concert and seeing through the music is a trope that he used a lot in his writing.” “One thing that a lot of people don’t know about Cain is that he loved classical music and opera,” Skenazy said. Cain,” said that the short story contains clues that support the conclusion that Cain, and not anyone else, wrote this story.įor instance, a character in “Blackmail” attends a concert of Beethoven’s First Symphony at the National Symphony Orchestra, which another character dismisses as “egghead music.” Paul Skenazy, a retired literature professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz and the author of the 1989 biography, “James M. ![]()
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