“A Jaguar is an Awful Cat”. Animals and Animal Metaphors in James M. Cain’s Novels

Abstract

James M. Cain is often linked with hard-boiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Actually, he wrote a different kind of novels, where there are no ‘private eye’ detectives and very few murders. Robert Polito describes them as Noir Novels, using a term normally associated with the famous Hollywood genre, because of their particular emphasis on psyche and drama issues – distinctive elements of the Film Noir Era.