PAUL CAIN isn’t his real name. Is slender, blond, usually bearded. He wasted his first thirty years as a matter of course and principle; wandered over South America, Europe, northern Africa and the Near East; been a bosun’s-mate, Dada painter, gambler, and a “no“-man in Hollywood.
This biographical note for the hard-boiled novel Fast One, published by Doubleday in 1933, was presumably written by the author himself and leaves more questions than answers. The only publicity photo of “Paul Cain” is crossed out with a white censor bar across the author’s eyes, somewhat resembling a slash from a knife.
Fast One (1933) features one of the first anti-heroes of modern American crime fiction: Gerry Kells, a former enforcer from New York now enjoying a life of leisure out in Los Angeles until he becomes ensnared in a conspiratorial web when he is pinned for a murder he did not commit. A gambler, racketeer and killer for hire, Kells was called “the toughest of all the characters to come out of Black Mask [magazine]” by crime fiction author Jack Adrian.
The book has become a classic of the crime genre, as gritty and authentic as any depicting the desperate survival of those wallowing in the mire of America’s gutter. It was bestowed with a now-famous blurb by crime novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of private eye Philip Marlowe, who called Fast One “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.”
“For sheer pacing, brutality, and utter lack of anything approximating a moral message, Paul Cain can’t be touched, even by modern writers,” Matthew Louis writes in an essay for the 2012 reprint of Fast One.
During the heyday of pulp fiction, authors were encouraged by editors and publishers to embellish their lived experiences or reinvent their public persona to lend a sense of authenticity to the stories they wrote. But this was something else entirely.
Sims “could not have described his thugs, tramps, crooks and cruel violence merely through guesswork,” Louis asserts. “He could not have created the fiercely independent Gerry Kells without having elements of Kells in his own personality. He could not, in short, have become Paul Cain unless Paul Cain was residing somewhere in the psyche and background of George Carol Sims.”
George Caryl Sims (sometimes spelled George Carol Sims) was born in Des Moines on May 30, 1902. His father William Dow Sims was a drugstore owner and police detective. The family spent at least a year living in a rough neighborhood in Chicago. After his parents split up, he and his mother Eva headed to Los Angeles, possibly in 1921 or thereabouts. His father and paternal grandfather George C. Sims, a Civil War veteran, joined them out west within a few years.
Sims was on his way to reinventing himself as the most intriguing character he would ever create.
Organized crime flourished in the 1920s and ’30s under Prohibition, in the shadow of the First World War. From cops to politicians, everyone seemed to be on the take or on the make. Working people were getting rough breaks and raw deals at every turn.
“The pulps” were named after the cheap wood-pulp paper on which they were printed, making them more accessible to the masses than “the slicks” — such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and Liberty — printed on more expensive glossy pages.
Pulp magazines were often sensational and titillating, spanning Westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, aviation, romance, detective stories and gritty crime. They were often subject to censorship, banned from libraries and schools or even burned by church groups for corrupting the youth.
For mystery and crime, one of the most famous outlets was the legendary Black Mask magazine, founded by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to finance another literary venture, The Smart Set, which appealed to a more upscale but limited readership.
Since its first issue was published in April 1920, Black Mask would go on to publish Chandler, Carroll John Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy and Raoul Whitfield, along with other contributors who would become affectionately known as “The Black Mask Boys.” Six months after launching, Mencken and Nathan sold the magazine to Pro-Distributors Corporation for $12,500.
Despite their popularity, the pulps were often derided as “trashy” or “throwaway” fiction, either to be traded among readers like baseball cards or discarded like toilet paper. This view was shared by the founders of Black Mask. In a letter penned by Mencken, he dismisses the publication as “a lousy magazine, all detective stories, [that has] burdened Nathan and me with disagreeable work.”
The magazine’s “Golden Era” is credited to the hiring of Joseph “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw (1874-1952), who took over as editor in 1926. Obtaining his rank of army captain during WWI, Shaw was a former newspaper reporter with a penchant for cigars and discovering new talent. He described the magazine’s style as “hard, brittle…a full employment of the function of dialogue, and authenticity in characterization and action.”
In 1930, Sims went to New York. He hooked up with actress Gertrude Michael in a turbulent, alcohol-soaked relationship. Michael is speculated as being the inspiration for Kells’ lush of a lover, S. Granquist, in Fast One. When he was 29, he sold his first story to Black Mask, “Fast One,” published in March 1932 under the pseudonym “Paul Cain.” Shaw immediately took a liking to the kid who escaped Des Moines, or as Mencken called it, “double Dubuque.”
Sims’ breathless prose speeds along at breakneck pace, spitting lines out like bullets from a machine gun. While Sims did not delve too deeply into the psychological interiors of his characters, they are not cardboard cutouts simply obeying the author’s contrivances. They have red blood pumping through their veins like gasoline. His stories can erupt with fits of morbid humor rivaling later-period crime writers Jim Thompson, Chester Himes and David Goodis, who are considered “The Second Wave” or “Second Generation” of crime and pulp writers.
The author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1995), Robert Polito, writes, “…the surreal violence of Paul Cain’s Fast One certainly anticipate the cruel habits of Thompson’s heroes.”
Stripping his prose to the bone, Sims delivers the goods, as illustrated in the final passage from the first chapter of Fast One:
“The kitten jumped off the desk and went to Kells’ bloody head and sniffed delicately. Kells could feel the kitten’s warm breath. Then everything got dark and he couldn’t feel anything any more. [sic]”
Or take this line from the short story “Trouble Chaser,” published 1934:
“She raised the revolver slowly and I saw the muscles of her hand tense a little. I think she felt there was someone behind her but she did not trust her feeling enough; she raised the revolver and stared at me with cold, glittering eyes.”
Adrian calls this story “as mean and lean as anything Cain [Sims] ever wrote; it is written in a stripped-down prose style that makes the understatement of Ernest Hemingway look flowery and the minimalism of Andrew Vachss seem somehow overblown.”
Sims wrote a total of 17 stories for the magazine, the bulk of his literary legacy. While he did contribute a story each to Detective Fiction Weekly and Star Detective Magazine, when Shaw was fired as editor in 1936 over a salary dispute, he exited, as did Raymond Chandler, in solidarity.
Just as Chandler later “cannibalized” his Black Mask stories for his debut novel, The Big Sleep (1939), Cain did the same for his first and final novel Fast One six years earlier, using five of his stories published in the magazine.
“In the matter of grim hardness, Dash [Dashiell Hammett] paused on the threshold,” Shaw once remarked. “Paul went all the way.”
In the years following the stock market crash of 1929, those feeling trapped, eking out paltry existences in the mundane humdrum of daily life, sought to escape by paying the price of admission to their local cinemas. Some took this a step further by packing up their belongings and headed west to The Dream Factory to work in the movies, to be part of the fantasy world glimpsed from the silver screens in the hometowns they left behind. Scores of Midwesterners, Iowans among them, felt this was the only way out of a life of poverty and obscurity.
As the Great Depression dragged on, Hollywood churned out musicals and screwball comedies for those who wanted to be whisked away to a better place, as well as class-conscious films mirroring the plight of workers struggling to obtain the ever-elusive American Dream. However, the pulps had a major influence on Hollywood, inspiring the gangster films of the 1930s and noir films of the ’40s and ’50s.
Living in the City of Angels, Sims assumed the alias “Peter Ruric” when he started working as a screenwriter. In 1923, he was listed as an “author” in the 1923 L.A. City Directory, and by 1925, he received a screen credit as a production assistant for director Josef Von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters as “George Ruric.”
Appearing in a strange real-life cameo, Sims’ alias “Ruric” is referenced in the biography of actress Myrna Loy (1905-1993), famous for roles such as Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) based on Hammett’s novel of the same name. In her 1987 book co-written with James Kotsilibas-Davis, Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, Loy (whose birth name was Myrna Adele Williams), recalls her difficulty in trying to come up with a screen name:
“Then, Peter Rurick [sic], a wild Russian writer of free verse, suddenly came up with ‘Myrna Loy.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ It sounded alright, but I wasn’t convinced about changing my name.”
In 1933, when he was 31, Sims was living at the posh new Montecito Hotel apartments on the corner of Franklin and Cherokee Avenue. Built in 1930 to provide housing for those working in the flourishing film industry, the 10-story building with two basements was designed by architect Marcus Phillips Miller (1892-1949) in the art deco style with Mayan Rival detailing.
Under the Peter Ruric moniker, Sims wrote the screenplays for Affairs Of A Gentleman (1934), Grand Central Murder (1942), which he co-wrote with Sue MacVeigh, and Mademoiselle Fifi (1944). He also collaborated on an adaptation of the British drama Jericho starring Paul Robeson (1937), which was released as Dark Sands in the United States, and the stories for The Gambling Ship (1933), Twelve Crowded Hours (1939) and Alias A Gentleman (1948), marking his final film credit.
Sims’, or rather Ruric’s, most notable screenwriting credit is The Black Cat (1934), featuring an iconic pairing of actors Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Universal Studios was still riding high on the box-office success of their horror franchise including Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy.
The opening title cards allege the story is “suggested by the immortal Edgar Allan Poe Classic,” published in 1843. Poe, it is worth noting, is credited with writing the first modern American detective story with “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). Despite the appearance of a black feline in both Poe’s tale and the adaptation by Austrian-Hungarian director Edgar G. Ulmer and Sims, the film The Black Cat is an entirely different beast.
The Black Cat opens on a train station at night. Smoke from the locomotive swirls around the platform, plunging the audience headfirst into the delirious fog of a nightmare. We find an American couple, Peter and Joan Allison (portrayed by David Manners and Julie Bishop under her birth name Jacqueline Wells), traveling across Hungary on their honeymoon. Their alone time is disturbed when Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi) enters their compartment. Though he is friendly enough, there’s something dark under his polite charm.
We learn that Werdegast has been away from his wife for 18 years after being called to service in WWI. For 15 years he was imprisoned in a Siberian camp by the Russians. He tells them, “I’ve come to visit an old friend.”
The unlikely trio share a cab ride to Gömbös. An accident kills their driver and injures Joan. Werdegast assists Peter with bringing her to the castle-like manor belonging to architect Hjalamar Poelzig (Karloff), who turns out to be the “friend” Werdegast spoke of earlier. The estate is built upon a battle site where thousands died during the war, dubbed by Werdegast as “The greatest graveyard in the world.”
We discover that Poelzig, now the leader of a Satanic cult, was the commander of the fort seized by the Russian army, cutting a deal with the enemy to slither away intact while sacrificing his comrades, leading to Werdegast’s imprisonment. Rubbing salt into a festering wound, Poelzig tells Werdegast he knows the whereabouts of Werdegast’s missing wife, and their daughter.
This nightmarish tale of revenge and betrayal was the lurid stuff of the pulps, but proved quite shocking for most audiences. Employing psychological theater and dream-like sequences, The Black Cat stands as a classic of American Expressionism, an artistic movement with roots in German Expressionism and films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).
Around the time of The Black Cat release, the major studios began self-censoring their output based on a set of production guidelines known as The Hays Code. The Code, lasting from 1934 until 1968, was named after William H. Hays, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and first president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.
As the self-appointed morality police were cracking down in Hollywood, The Black Cat managed to escape.
With a running time of only 66 minutes, The Black Cat is relatively short for a feature film. Scenes were cut from the final version, and while it is uncertain whether their exclusion was a creative choice or due to censorship, the omitted scenes are now considered “lost.”
Writing for the New Yorker in 2015, journalist Richard Brody notes how Europe, in the brief period following “the war to end all wars,” was on a collision course with mass destruction as fascism encroached upon the continent. Benito Mussolini had become “Il Duce” in Italy, Gyula Gömbös of Hungary was spreading antisemitism through military force and Adolf Hitler was cementing his dominance of Germany after being elected chancellor, while Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria and Miklós Horthy of Hungary made a bloody pact with The Third Reich.
“The Black Cat is essentially a horror movie of Europe’s Lost Generation, about the dead souls of those who survived the unendurable slaughter and the dead souls of those who survived in the bad faith of comfort at home,” journalist Richard Brody writes in a 2015 New Yorker piece titled “My Favorite Halloween Movie.”
With his literary career waning, Sims’ final work of fiction, a non-crime story titled “The Tasting Machine,” was published in two issues of Gourmet magazine in 1948 under the name “Peter Ruric.” He tried to find a home for his novel Truce and the never-produced stage play The Ecstasy Department, but was unsuccessful. Well past the peak of his career, his final screen credit was his work on an episode of the 1960s Western TV series The Lady in Yellow, titled “The Man from Blackhawk.” Sims was married (and divorced) three times and traveled around Europe.
In the end, he wound up back in his adopted homeland of California, dying penniless in 1966. His last known residence was a modest bungalow at 6127 Glen Holly Street.
Sims’ stories survive mostly in anthologies of hard-boiled fiction, along with his films. The relatively few works in his literary oeuvre have been reprinted by specialty publishers, but tend to be prohibitively expensive for the average reader. Pulp stories and their colorful covers were not treated as art, so little care was taken into preserving them. Most of the cover art for these publications was destroyed or lost, the pages yellowed and left crumbling in readers’ hands.
As is too often the case with dead authors, the passage of time lends respectability to talents who were not recognized in their time. Pulp writers Chandler and Hammett have entered the canon of “respectable” literature, recognized as masters of a uniquely American art form.
In the 1980s, a writer named David A. Bowman attempted to write a biography about Sims, seeking information by placing an ad in the classifieds section of the Los Angeles Times, but to no avail. Instead, he wrote the introduction to the 1987 Black Lizard edition of Fast One.
Writers have attempted to piece together the few fragments of Sims’ life to build a more comprehensive portrait. Yet there is still so much we do not know about our hero: His lost years before his career took off, his obsession with concealing his identity, to what degree his stories were based on his own life, and endless other questions that only lead to dead ends. As with his life and career, Sims left it up to readers to fill in the blanks.
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A shorter version of this article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.
