Today is July 1. It is the birthday of A. M. Burrage (1889-1956), Otis Adelbert Klein (1891-1946), and James M. Cain (1892-1977). This will be a brief look at each becasue one, it’s late and I want to go to bed, and two, I need to keep my wriitnng streak up.

Arthur McClellan Burrage was a prolific writer of ghost stories. The traditional English kind. somewhat in the vein of M. R. James. A few decades ago, Ash-Tree Press published four collections of his work. I’m not sure if those volumes were intended to be the complete ghsot stories or not. Good luck finding copies, and be prepared to pay big if you do. Ash-Tree books are highly collectible.

But if you want to read Burrage, and you should, then there are electroinic editions of his work available as one or two print books from other publishers, and he is usually represented in any large anthology of ghost stories.

Otis Adelbert Kline has two distinctions. First, he was the literary agent for Robert E. Howard. But before that, he was a pulp writer of some note, with works appearing in Weird Tales, although he wasn’t as well known his client Howard. Kline published several stories (serials, really) that had to do with adventures on Mars and Venus. I’ve not read any of them yet, but they were sword and planet stories and are often considered Burroughs pastiches.

My understanding is they aren’t quite as good as the sword and planet Burroughs wrote, but they are worth reading. Paizo’s Planet Stories line reprinted the Mars books back when they were still in business.

The final birthday notice is James M. Cain. Cain wrote in the harboiled school of detective fiction alongside Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They are often considered the Big Three of that era.

Cain’s two best known novels are Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The latter has an excellent opening line. Hard Case Crime published The Cocktail Waitress some years ago, an previously unpublished novel. I’ve not read it yet, although I have a copy.

The Cain novel that I thought was especially well-done, and very twisty (not to mention twisted), was the short novel The Butterfly. It concerns two middle-aged men who are essentially hillbillies. The story is set up in the mountains. They are reach trying to seduce a young girl. She may be slightly underaged. I don’t recall. The twist is that one of the men happens to be her father, although he doesn’t know it. Which of the men the reader thinks is her father changes more than once as the reader gets more information.  Not exactly everyone’s cup of tea, of course. And definitely a sordid topic. But Cain does a good job of keeping the suspense up and the reader guessing. I may have to give it a reread. I read it in graduate school, and that was [REDACTED] years ago.

So, three very different writers, all born on this day. Which is your favorite?