Serenade

John Howard Sharp is an American opera singer washed up and broke in Mexico City when he meets Juana, a prostitute who somehow restores the voice he had lost. Their return to the United States and to his career becomes a study in obsession, class and self-destruction, told in Cain’s stripped, hard-driving prose. Lesser known than his Postman and Double Indemnity, and startlingly frank for 1937. Guillermo del Toro calls it a really dark hardboiled story of passion, desire and murder.