Serenade

314 pp. Inspiration for film starring Ann Sheridan. "Serenade is the story of the eternal triangle - with a difference. John Howard Sharp is an American opera singer down on his luck, having just bombed in Rigoletto in Mexico City when he first encounters the beautiful Mexican-Indian prostitute called Juana. Miraculously, she offers him the chance to rebuild his career in Hollywood and New York but then Winston Hawes, the young, rich and well-connected conductor who had first launched Sharp, comes back into his life with terrible consequences." ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892 - October 27, 1977) was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labelling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir. Several of his crime novels inspired highly successful movies. Cain was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland. The son of a prominent educator and an opera singer, he had inherited his love for music from his mother, but his high hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough. After graduating from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain served as president, in 1910, Cain began working as a journalist for the Baltimore Sun. Cain was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an Army magazine. Back in the States, he continued working as a journalist writing editorials for the New York World and articles for American Mercury. He briefly served as the managing editor of The New Yorker, but later turned to screenplays and finally to fiction. Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name only appears on the credits of three films: Algiers, Stand Up and Fight, and Gypsy Wildcat. Cain's first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934. Two years later the serialized Double Indemnity was published. Cain made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute in tow); Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the only daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer); and Career in C Major, a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovers that he has a better voice than she does (Cain's fourth wife, Florence Macbeth, was a retired opera singer)." - Wikipedia