Biography

George Carol Sims' writing career was spent under two distinct pseudonyms. As Paul Cain he wrote a remarkable series of 17 hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine "Black Mask" beginning in early 1932. His character, gambler Gerry Kells, was so popular that the first five stories were combined in book form as "Fast One" in 1933 and remains today as one of the best examples of the genre. His other coinciding writing career was spent as screenwriter Peter Ruric; his most notable script was for The Black Cat (1934), a lesser Boris Karloff classic.

The son of a police detective, Sims was born in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents separated in 1908 and he spent the next decade living in a tough neighborhood in Chicago. Sims ended up in southern California in 1918 and became fascinated with the film industry, eventually gaining work as a production assistant and uncredited scenarist. On a trip to New York City in the early 1930s he met hard-drinking actress Gertrude Michael and together they returned to Hollywood in 1932, where she had a brief run at A-movie stardom at Paramount that was derailed by the studio's financial trouble and her alcoholism. Their relationship was really a three-way co-dependent affair with the bottle and Michael, whose once-promising acting career had nosedived by 1935, left him after he wrote a widely-read, thinly-veiled account of her. Sims eventually scripted nine films for major studios, but his increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936. His Hollywood career ended at the chaotically run RKO Studios in 1944 and Sims would spend much of the late 1940s and 1950s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959 but found that his reputation kept the doors of the crumbling studio system closed to him. He contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jack Backstreet (qv's & corrections by A. Nonymous)