Pulp Classic

SERENADE -- James M. Cain -- Knopf ($2.50).

In The Postman Always Rings Twice James Mallahan Cain wrote a brief, brisk best-seller in which philosophic overtones could be dimly heard above the rattling melodrama of the plot. Last week he published a second novel that is just as melodramatic as his first, a little longer, equally swift reading. It has its quota of close shaves, fights, flights and two-dimensional characters, suggests an old-fashioned pulp magazine thriller brought up to date by a writer who knows Freud as well as all tricks of suspense. Its hero (and narrator) is a world-famous singer who has lost his voice as well as his self-respect, expresses himself in language more appropriate to a police reporter than a star of the Metropolitan.

Serenade begins when tough, embittered John Howard Sharp, once an opera star, now a singer in tenth-rate Mexico City night clubs, gets involved in an argument with a bullfighter over a prostitute, takes her home, is invited to act as bookkeeper and chauffeur for a disreputable hotel in the steamy coast town of Acapulco. As he is driving to Acapulco with the owlish, observant Juana, a storm drives them into one of Mexico's closed churches, where Howard builds a fire, cooks meals, despite Juana's fears of sacrilege. While the candles blow out, thunder rolls and lightning flashes, Howard sings, attacks the girl after she has ridiculed him. She tries to kill him. For some reason unknown to him Howard discovers that his voice has returned.

After this nightmarish episode, which is followed almost immediately by a nightmarish encounter with police, they escape to the U. S., where Howard climbs slowly back to fortune by way of unpaid radio appearances in Los Angeles, a chance to fill in during an operatic emergency, a role in a cheap movie that turns into a hit. When he is on top of the world again, with Juana in a Gramercy Park hideaway in Manhattan, his evil genius appears--a suave, wealthy, possessive conductor and music patron named Hawes. Although Howard struggles in increasing panic, Juana guesses what is wrong, learns that Hawes had been obscurely responsible for his previous decline, tells him contemptuously that only men can sing. Treating bluntly a theme that was almost too delicate for Proust, Author Cain brings his story to a violent conclusion, with Hawes and Juana both dead, the singer silent again. But Howard no longer thinks of his own tragedy, broods instead on the ruin he caused a girl who knew more about him than he knew about himself.

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