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Seven brutally ingenius tales of murder passionate and cold-blooded, written by a poet of the hard-boiled. There's Black, a stranger in town, who gets drafted into a gang war just because he had the bad luck to trip over a corpse on his way from the station. There's the glamorous Bella, whose boyfriends have the distressing habit of stabbing one another while she naps in the next room. And of course there's Johnny Doolin, who hires himself out as a bodyguard--only to find that his client has no interest in staying alive. The men and women inSeven Slayersare exactly what the title promises: people who kill for love or money or for the sheer, perverse joy of homicide. And this riveting collection is one of the few surviving books by Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, aka George Sims), a hard-drinking, enigmatic writer of the 1930s who had as many pseudonyms as he had wives and of whom Raymond Chandler wrote that he had reached in his fiction "a high point in the hard-boiled manner."… (more)
User reviews
The stories vary in quality: a bleak vignette called "Parlor Trick" is reminiscent of Fast One, while "Murder in Blue" (the tale of an amiable Hollywood stuntman turned detective/bodyguard/con artist who gets in way over his head) is enlivened by touches of whimsy and even human warmth. My favorite is "One, Two, Three," a fun murder caper in which Cain managed to find humor in one of his recurring themes, that of the beautiful but treacherous woman. Seven Slayers doesn't include his best story, "Trouble Chaser," but you can find that one in Pronzini & Adrian's Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories.
Like everyone who followed in the footsteps of Dashiell Hammett (until Raymond Chandler, whose psychologically mature writing initiated a sea change in the genre), Paul Cain was trying to outdo Hammett's slick and seemingly effortless minimalism. He didn't succeed--he wasn't a good enough writer for that--but he had his moments.