One, the dirt available on a potential lover with a few clicks of a mouse and a credit card today would kill the story in the first chapter. So as widely admired as Cain may be, to pay homage to his memory and the genre by writing a modern noir is tricky on a number of levels. And the women for the most part were femme fatales- their roles as predictable and one-dimensional as the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Charming, sex-crazed, often thick as bricks, they nonetheless have the magnetic appeal of rapper MC Ren’s roughnecks. But in almost all of the classic noir stories (Cain’s “Mildred Pierce” aside) the protagonists - the people who make things happen - are men. A man walks into a rural California diner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” commences a torrid affair with the wife of the owner and plots to kill her husband in “Double Indemnity,” an insurance agent helps a client kill her husband for the insurance money. Unlike contemporaneous hard-boiled crime writers whose work featured knight-errant detectives (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler), Cain’s protagonists are the victims, suspects or perpetrators of crimes. Cain, whose novels arguably helped establish the standard for the genre in both fiction and film. When you think of noir fiction - the erotic, morally ambiguous crime stories popularized in the first half of the 20th century - which authors come to mind? Noir geeks might cite Jim Thompson’s “The Killer Inside Me” or Cornell Woolrich’s “The Bride Wore Black,” but the forerunner and best known of them all is James M.

Laura vera caspary sparknotes