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Title: Serenade by James M. Cain ISBN: 0-7859-1976-7 Publisher: French & European Pubns Pub. Date: 01 October, 1983 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $14.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Tragically Good
Comment: Taken in parts or out of the context of when it was written, this book could offend some sensibilities.

Taken as a whole, this book can be compared to a spur of the moment road trip through the hills and backcountry that goes tragically awry. And a trip it is, filled with twists and turns that were certainly not on the map! Enjoy!

Rating: 4
Summary: Night Song
Comment: James M Cain's 1937 novel "Serenade"is, as the title suggests a love story, but a very dark and devious love story it is indeed. In keeping with its musical motif, it seems to be constructed in the symphonic form, thus:Chapters I-IV Andante Chapters V-VII Allegro Chapters VIII-X Scherzo Chapters XI-XIV Adagio. The hero-narrator John Howard Sharp is suppose to be an operatic baritone, but he talks and acts like a film noir P.I. Not that opera singers can't be macho, but I have a little difficulty picturing Humphrey Bogart playing Rigoletto. Prepare yourself for a very politically incorrect tone: A homosexual is a fag, a Japanese is a Jap, and a Mexican is a "spig" -- I assume he means spick. (This is 1937 so "gay" means "happy".) The mood is quite masculine, as are 95% of the characters, so it comes as a surprise when it's revealed that the hero has indulged in what use to be coyly called the love that dare not speak its name. The only major female character is Juana, the puta whom Sharp meets in Mexico City in the opening chapter. Throughout the story she seems to be the "dumb muchacha" she describes herself as; but she abruptly becomes a femme fatale, her desperate act of hatred driving the plot to its somber conclusion. The story opens and ends in Mexico, the interim describing the hero's entertaining though somewhat implausible successes in California and New York. In the Scherzo section, when Sharp is being courted by both the Met and the movies, Cain treats the Met with deference but his contempt for Hollywood is palpable. (Ironically enough, in 1956 Warner Bros used "Serenade" as the basis for a Mario Lanza musical. One can only imagine Cain's reaction to this sudsy mess.) Incidently, Cain's novels are included in Crime and Mystery sections. Appropriate, perhaps, but don't expect Miss Marple.

Rating: 3
Summary: The Tale of the Tough Guy Tenor
Comment: Compared to his earlier and much better The Postman Always Rings Twice, which tells a story as taut and inevitable as a Greek tragedy, James M. Cain's Serenade offers a plot as giddily rococo and improbable as the grandest of operas. I suppose that's appropriate, as this is the only hard-boiled novel I know of that features an opera singer hero/narrator; he may sing Rossini, but he talks like the sort of tough guy Bogart and Mitchum used to play. The settings have an operatic range as well, running the gamut from a verismo account of Depression-era Mexico to a phantasmagorically high-camp vision of New York's 1930s gay bohemia.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm making this book sound like more fun than it is. The last third of this relatively short novel explores an intense, unusual (and, I suppose, daring for its time) sexual triangle leading to a crime and its ultimate punishment. The first two-thirds, however, are slow-going, as we follow John Howard Sharp, a down-and-out opera singer in Mexico, as he falls in love with Juana, an Aztec princess variant on the prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold theme. After a brief romantic idyll in an empty church on the way to Acapulco, during which Sharp displays the sort of wilderness survival skills not seen since the heyday of James Fenimore Cooper (and at the same time regains his singing voice), the pair flee north to Los Angeles, where Sharp becomes the overnight star of Nelson Eddy-esque Hollywood musicals.

Then the story gets good. Dissatisfied with his success in movies, Sharp comes to New York to sing at the Met (Juana comes along to take night school classes in English) and reencounters his old mentor/tormentor Winston Hawes, a fabulously wealthy composer, conductor and apostle of the love that dared not speak its name (at least back in 1937). While the plot from here is riveting without being particularly surprising, I don't want to give anything away.

If the whole novel were as good as this last section, it would merit at least another star. However, if you are easily offended by outmoded social attitudes toward Mexicans and gays (in other words, if you don't read anything that borders on the racist or homophobic), please deduct a star or avoid this book altogether. For my part, I certainly think Serenade deserves to be in print, although I'd say anyone new to Cain would do well to read Postman and Double Indemnity first.