“James M. Cain”, by François Guérif, Marest, “Bis”, 242 p., €8.90.
“Only the Untamed” (The Brave Cowboy), by Edward Abbey, translated from English (United States) by Laura Derajinski and Jacques Mailhos, Gallmeister, “Totem”, 400 p., €11.50.
“Little praise of America”, by Brice Matthieussent, Folio, “3 €”, unpublished, 128 p., 3 €.
Trusted house created in 2016Marest has already offered die-hard movie buffs certain unadulterated joys, such as Pascal Françaix’s three volumes on “camp” aesthetics, the Memoirs of Richard Fleischer, Lotte Eisner and John Boorman, and unpublished interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Freshly hatched, “Bis”, his pocket collection, will allow him to “bis” certain titles, long unobtainable, such as James M. Cain by François Guérif, a very precious volume which reminds us that the founder of Rivages and smuggler of James Ellroy has in his glove compartment some high-caliber volumes on Eastwood, Mitchum, Chabrol and cine-polar.
His meticulous biography, all based on American sources, of the writer James Mallahan Cain (1892-1977), published by Séguier in 1993, allows us to get closer to this key and bitter figure of the American black screen. Entered history for the first time, in 1934, with the dry explosion of Postman always rings twicea second time the following year with the novella Insurance on death and a third with Mildred Pierce (1941), all adapted for the cinema, Cain, veteran of the Somme and professor of English and mathematics, was, before this winning hat-trick, combative journalist, merciless columnist and Hollywood screenwriter.
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