The Postman Always Rings Twice & Double Indemnity: James M Cain: Amazon.com: Books The Postman Always Rings Twice & Double Indemnity Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Next Special Offers and Product Promotions Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . New York Times best sellers Browse the New York Times best sellers in popular categories like Fiction, Nonfiction, Picture Books and more. See more Product Details By FCD117 on September 14, 2015 Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase This is an enjoyable, relatively short, novel. As is the case with most short novels, probably by necessity in a short novel, character development is kept to a minimum. The novel is also a time piece. The traffic and roads in the area around Los Angeles described here are very different from today. I have found this novel on at least one list of the supposed "100 greatest novels".

That, of course, is completely a matter of taste. However to me, I am quite certain I have read 100 novels better than this. By coincidence, I had just finished a Mickey Spillane novel, and I find the writing by James M. Cain to be of a much more developed and sophisticated nature. I think if one studies the biographies of these two authors, one can correlate the comparative writing styles to their backgrounds. Another interesting comparison (At least to me!) can be made between a short novel like this and a longer novel such as The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. In both novels, there is a side story wherein the protagonist embarks on a somewhat bizarre misadventure to Mexico with an unusual female. If one wishes, one may note the differences in length, detail and style of these two interludes. There is some allusions to what I might refer to as "rough sex" that surprised me. I cannot recall seeing that in American popular novels composed prior to this work. I do not know if this novel is considered "ground breaking" on that front or not. It did catch me by surprise.

As with the case of many American novels of this time period, there is quite a bit of negative ethnic references. There are negative allusions to people of Greek heritage and some negative terminology about Italian Americans. As I stated above this is common in American novels of this period. I only mention it in case it matters to a potential reader unfamiliar with this work or this literary period. By Deborah from Los Angeles on May 27, 2016 Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase I give this just three stars because even though, yes, I expected it to be "pulpy", it's so pulpy it's a tad shallow. No real character development and very much just "this is what happened to these people". Now, what happens is interesting and kept my attention, but I didn't at all care WHO it was happening to because Cain never dives deeply enough into who the characters are to make you care about them specifically (versus just the situation, more generally). In other words, you're involved in the characters' stories not for the characters and who they are, but for what they encounter. Also, for a fairly slim novel, it took me kind of a while (about a week) to read it.

Whenever I put it down, I wasn't dying to pick it back up. The book I have doesn't look like the one pictured, with the man and woman hugging on the cover. Mine shows a picture of the TITLE SCREEN from the 1946 movie. It's very cool. The design of the book, quality of the texture of the cover, and the inside formatting are fantastic. I really like that I own this book and have it on my shelf. If you enjoy classic films and hope to read and collect books published in the first half of the 20th century that were later made into classic films, you'll like owning this book. Finally, NO SPOILERS, but the Lana Turner/John Garfield movie (1946) was actually better than the book, but I won't say how or why because I don't want to spoil anything. By Greggorio! on January 24, 2014 Format: Paperback|Verified Purchase This book is a riveting classic of duplicity, love found, lost, and then found again, even eighty years after its first publication date.

It has moments of gut wrenching suspense interspersed with examples of heartless cruelty, and innocent, young, sweet love. The writing is taut, sufficiently descriptive and perhaps most surprisingly, the story is still relevant today. The best laid plans of mice and men can be lain flat by the simplest of things and early in the book, a cat of all things spoils the party for our two duplicitous love birds. i find it hard to believe that two people who can be so cruel and heartless can ever amount to anything and if fate or karma has a say in the way things turn out for any of us in this world, then young Cora and the tramp Frank Chambers don't gave much to look forward to. And they won't get any sympathy from me. This book is a classic of the genre. Those with any interest in crime, suspense, noir, or even the odd love story should get something from reading this delightful work of literature. Full marks for this one. BFN Greggorio! The Postman Always Rings Twice / Double Indemnity / Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M.

Cain, Robert Polito |, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble® The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories By James M. Cain Copyright © 2003 James M. Cain All right reserved. ISBN: 037541438X I was recently in a room with a group of writers, and the talk turned to James M. Cain. There were, I recall, five writers there, each of us about to teach a graduate writing workshop. The four others -- perhaps only incidentally? -- all were women, a mix of novelists, biographers, essayists, and poets (some multiply accomplished). I mentioned this essay, as something I was working on. The others instantly laughed, but not as though I had made a joke, or confessed a stupid action. This was the laughter of a shared secret. Everyone in that room, it turned out, was rereading, or had just reread Cain.

Each of my writer friends spoke of Cain with a sort of shiver in her voice, variously intimating the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Serenade, and Mildred Pierce also possessed forms of secret knowledge. One said that Cain is the sound of America for her. Others mentioned sex -- the power, and folly, and destruction of passion for Cain, as well as his depictions of ambitious women, weak men, and the occasional yet still striking single mother. Then -- the last remarked -- there's that style. Cain ultimately didn't invent anything. He is often celebrated as the axialfigure in the history of the crime novel, marking the shift from the detective, as in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, to the criminal, as in Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Patricia Highsmith. Yet that transformation was already implicit in the literary fiction of the 1920s and 1930s that cultivated violence and gangsters -- F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) Ernest Hemingway's 'The Killers' (1927), and William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931).

Cain's partisans routinely debate whether it was he or Hemingway who spawned the American demotic for literature, but those colloquial tones were rattling everywhere by 1930, in William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Thomas Beer as well as Hammett and Hemingway. Did the demotic even require such a tardy delivery? D.H. Lawrence for his Studies in Classic American Literature glanced back from 1923 to still earlier American novelists and poets. 'The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached,' Lawrence proposed. 'The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today.' Chandler and Hammett now sustain canonical status; Thompson, Goodis, and Highsmith engage their distinguished cults.

Cain alone survives -- for all his best-sellers (eight between 1934 and 1948), and the hit films adapted from his novels -- as a writer's writer, on the rarer authority of what my friend tagged 'that style'. Our room of writers, all obsessed with language and sentences, likely was responding in Cain to what aroused Albert Camus when he famously recast that style for his novel The Stranger. The film and sound editor Walter Murch told Michael Ondaatje in The Conversations that, 'I spent a lot of time trying to discover those key sounds that bring universes with them.' The sounds of Cain's sentences, particularly his first-person fictions of the 1930s and 1940s, vividly shadow pure-product American characters, but they also instantly summon worlds. Here are some signature opening lines from his early novels and serials: They threw me off the hay truck about noon. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1936) I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.

Double Indemnity (1936) I was in the Tupinamba, having a bizcocho and coffee, when this girl came in. Serenade (1937) All this, that I'm going to tell you, started several years ago. -- Career in C Major (1938) I first met her when she came over to the house one night, after calling me on the telephone and asking if she could see me on a matter of business. -- The Embezzler (1948) In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees. Mildred Pierce (1941) A concoction of carnality and California, highways, cars, fast food, and lunges at stardom, this Cain universe is insistently tangible, rooted in objects and work, fascinated by road signs, tabloids, radio, and insurance tables, yet tilting toward fable, even surrealism.

Recall the puma who appears in court at the end of The Postman Always Rings Twice, or the nightmare phantasmagoria in Double Indemnity, as Phyllis emerges panting across the dark rails, hoisting her dead husband. The women are enterprising, sometimes viewed as rapacious, sometimes as diabolic, and the men rarely as smart or bold as their desires, and all the mortals are restless. Defensive, anxious about their class, race, money, or achievement, Cain's people slenderly know themselves, much as Cain once said he could only write well by assuming another's voice. 'There's something very peculiar about me that I don't understand,' he told his biographer, Roy Hoopes. 'I cannot write in the third person -- and it seems to have something to do with this sense of a lack of accomplishment. I have written three books in the third person and they came off all right, but did not have the bite of the others . . . Now, when I write in the first person, that's different.

But to write anything, I have to pretend to be somebody else.' Sometime between November 1931, when he quit journalism and the East Coast for Los Angeles and the movies, and the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice by Knopf early in 1934, Cain arrived at the cunning, bluff and skittish style that is one of the indelible feats of American noir. James Mallahan Cain was born at the opposite end of the American psychic topography from southern California, in Colonial Annapolis, Maryland, on 1 July 1892. All his grandparents had emigrated from Ireland during the 1850s, settling in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, James W. Cain, a Yale graduate, taught mathematics and English literature at St John's College in Annapolis. His mother, Rose Mallahan, was a trained lyric soprano, with 'the Brunnhilde voice', as Cain later evoked her. Living in an ivy-covered brick faculty residence on the St John's campus, the Cains maintained a cultured household for Jamie (as he called himself until he started school) and his four siblings, a brother and three sisters.

Both his parents were attractive and popular, and his father, not so much a scholar as a wily academic operator who eventually assumed the presidency of Washington College, across the Bay in Chestertown, appears to have intimidated his son. A 'handsome, gabby, likeable rake', as Cain recalled in an unpublished memoir, his father 'mold[ed] all three of his weaknesses, his love of drink, his love of talk, and his fear of work, into one pillar of massive strength'. By contrast, the recurrently double-promoted Cain entered college at age fourteen, and although tall he described himself there as a 'a midget among giants'. His face pockmarked under a helmet of unruly hair, he was nicknamed 'Pedro' and designated in the senior yearbook as 'the awkwardest man of the class'. After he graduated Washington College in 1910, at age seventeen, Cain drifted into odd jobs around Maryland -- copying ledgers for Consolidated Gas and Light of Baltimore; inspecting roads for the State Roads Commission; principal of a high school in Vienna -- before he moved to Washington, D.C. to pursue a calling as a singer.

He financed his singing lessons, selling insurance for the general Accident Company -- stocking information that would backdrop his novels The Postman Always Rings Twice and, particularly, Double Indemnity. His status as a failed singer stayed a conspicuous plank in Cain's private mythology. 'Writing to me,' he told Edmund Wilson, 'was distinctly a consolation prize', but the singing lessons lasted only the single summer of 1914 before they ceased. Music is everywhere in Cain -- who else would represent the murder of Nick Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice as the stopped echo of a high note? But for all his fascination for classical music, Cain could never portray singers convincingly. Mildred Pierce nearly skips the rails when, after perhaps six months of vocal training, Veda suddenly emerges on the radio as a 'miracle voice' coloratura soprano. John Howard Sharp in Serenade is scarcely more plausible when he discusses his music. Manny Farber once praised Samuel Fuller's scripts as 'grotesque jobs that might have been written by the bus driver in The Honeymooners'. Sharp is Ralph Kramden as an opera star -- at least Kramden's fantasy of an opera star.

Sharp, for instance, performs Carmen -- cold -- at the Hollywood Bowl, after the scheduled singer falters: You think that's impossible, that a man can go on and sing stuff that he never even saw . . . I didn't even bother to look what the words were. I bellowed 'Aupre's de ma blonde, qu'il fait bon, fait bon,' and let it go at that . . . In the Toreador Song, on the long 'Ah' that leads into the chorus, I broke out the cape and made a couple of passes at the bull. Not too much, you understand. A prop can kill a number. But enough that I got that swirl of crimson and yellow into it. It stopped the show, and he let me repeat the second verse. No less sensationally, Cain sketched his own decision to become a writer as an American Pauline conversion.

Sitting on a bench across from the White House, no less, in Lafayette Park in September 1914, depressed over the ruins of his musical career, he claimed he heard his voice say, 'You're going to be a writer!' Cain would not publish his first short story -- 'Pastorale' -- until 1929, and a novel until 1934. Hoopes's otherwise shrewd biography tends to chart the interval as a sequence of edifying stages along life's way toward an inevitable destination: take a left at Teaching English, then a right at Newspaper Journalism, don't forget to stop for H. L. Mencken, and once you pass the Satirical Dialogues just before Screenplay Flats, you'll know you're almost at Fiction. Some of these sites are worth dwelling on, even if Cain'sprogress to Postman might have transpired or expired in any multitude of other routes. As he worked over and sent out short stories, now lost, he returned home to Chestertown, taught English and mathematics at the preparatory school of Washington College, and lived in a dormitory.

For his English classes, Cain stressed the imaginative release of grammar, syntax, and punctuation -- the only elements of writing that, apparently, he believed could be taught. 'When you learn how to punctuate, you'll be free to be yourselves' -- Cain recounted his instruction of his students to David Madden. 'Instead of being in a straitjacket of what can be put between commas with a period at the end, you can write as freely as you talk, and know you can set it up so it reads.' Particularly in his novels of the thirties and early forties, Cain was a writer for whom elastic syntax and the shaping of resilient sentences is an adventure. He could seize formal rigor, precision and variousness probably only matched in American crime fiction by the David Goodis of Down There. If, as Julian Symons once speculated, Cain's 'chief limitation' was 'coarseness', that vulgarity, he insisted, was 'not of language . . . but of feeling'. Perhaps to reinforce Symons's caveat about coarse feelings, Cain remembered his young students in scenes that invoke the lust at first sight moments in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.

His abandoned memoir recalls a girl from a summer algebra class he taught a few years later in Easton, Pennsylvania: And then in one of those classes she appeared. She was, I would say, twelve, and her second day in class she showed up in black silk stockings . . . The pair of legs were the most beautiful I've seen on a twelve-year-old, who folded them in her seat in such a way as to let me glimpse Honolulu, as Zsa Zsa Gabor called it -- then let her eyes lock with mine. Cain stopped teaching in 1917, except for a brief stint later at St John's College, and for the next fourteen years was employed as a journalist -- first as a reporter for the Baltimore American (1917), then for the Baltimore Sun (1918 and 1920-1923). After he moved to Manhattan in 1924 he wrote editorials for Walter Lippman in the New York World (1924-1931), and eventually a signed column in the Metropolitan Section (1928-1931).

When the World shut down in 1931 he worked as managing editor of The New Yorker. Cain meanwhile entered the Army in 1918, and as a private in the 79th Infantry Division fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive (his 1929 story 'The Taking of Montfaucon' memorialized the campaign). He also edited the Division newspaper, The Lorraine Cross. For his most ambitious reporting sally Cain covered the treason trial of William Blizzard, president of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, for the Sun. During this early Red Scare clash, he sided with the union, despite threats from the state police, and the mine owners lobbied the paper to have him fired. He wrote reflective stories about the episode for the Atlantic Monthly and The Nation, and returned to the coalmines for a first attempt at a novel, eventually jettisoned to the wastebasket. After meeting Mencken, Cain started to publish in the American Mercury, articles, then satiric dialogues, and finally short fiction.

He joined Mencken's boozy Saturday Night Club, then his Sunday Night Club, and as Cain later wrote, the infamous iconoclast 'freed me from the thrall of the local literarians . . . liberated me from the village pump'. Cain despised the 'corporate awfulness' of his World editorials, but the humorous dialogues in vernacular dialects both rural (Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia) and urban (New York) proved so popular that in he made a book of them, Our Government. Following the appearance of 'Pastorale' in the March 1928 American Mercury, Cain slipped in an occasional short story among his dialogues and articles -- 'The Taking of Mountfaucon' is the most persuasive and lasting. But not before he departed for Hollywood late in 1931 to write for Paramount did he really start to produce fiction. Cain disliked movies -- 'there was no such thing as a good one,' he claimed. John Howard Sharp seems to speak for Cain in his tirade against Hollywood from the self-styled high-art angle of his singing: I didn't like Hollywood. I didn't like it partly because of the way they treated a singer . .

. To them, singing is just something you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something that hasn't occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake is a producer that can't tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn't know a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for him one night, that can't read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made, that can't even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing, literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent him Clark Gable to play in it. I did all right, you understand . . . I kind of got the hang of how you handle things out there to get along. But I never liked it, not even for a second. Continues... Excerpted from The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain Copyright © 2003 by James M. Cain.

Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice - Mulholland Books Jan 10, 2011 in Books , Film , Guest Posts , Mulholland Authors , Mulholland News The following article was originally published in the fantastic Edgar-nominated anthology Thrillers: 100 Must Reads , edited by David Morrell, who has kindly given us permission to re-print Joe R. Lansdale’s essay here. Please support this wonderful and timely collection available wherever books are sold. Born in Annapolis, James M. Cain (1892–1977) studied at Washington College, in Chesterton, Maryland, earning his B.A. and master’s there. He worked as a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. His novels are often mentioned in the same breath with those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as a key contributor to the so called hard-boiled school of crime fiction.

Cain resisted that label, however, stating that he belonged “to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise.” Several of Cain’s novels were adapted into films. Three— The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941)—are considered classics of the American screen. Cain’s post World War II works include The Butterfly (1947), a story of incest and murder set in Kentucky, as well as his personal favorite, a Depression hobo novel, The Moth (1948). In 1970, he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. James M. Cain was the master of hard-boiled prose, lean clean dialogue shiny as a new dime. He wrote like a demon on holiday, sexed up and hung over, and he changed the landscape of literature as surely as Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler.

But as Tom Wolfe wrote: “Nobody has quite pulled if off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, not even Raymond Chandler.” In fact, Chandler thought very little of Cain and then adapted one of his best books into BillyWilder’s noir film Double Indemnity . The dialogue is snappier than Cain’s, and some of the scenes have a kind of high poetry about them. But Cain’s fiction stands quite well on its own and has about it a kind of working man’s muscular poetry, soaked in sweat and hormones so ripe you can almost smell it. The characters themselves are not poetic at all. At first glance, they appear to be everyday people. They want what most people want. A goo life. But the cold difference is they’re unwilling to work for it. At their core they feel entitled, above and beyond the working person’s code.With The Postman Always Rings Twice , Cain established this theme at the start of his career, and in most of his novels it’s hammered at with the hardworking mentality of a blacksmith shaping a horseshoe. Later, he perhaps shaped too many similar horseshoes, but he pounded out two masterpieces that changed the landscape of crime writing and other forms of writing dramatically.

His work inspired so many novels, films, and even comic books, that if they were piled on top of one another they’d reach to the moon and beyond. Those two masterpieces were The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity . The former is possibly the most famous, if for no other reason than the title is a mystery unexplained by the book. Nowhere inside the story does the line appear, or anything that resembles the title, but the title works. It brings to mind a kind of dead certainty like the arrival of the postman, who, if you don’t answer the call on the first ring, you will on the second. And that’s exactly what happens in the novel; there’s a chance to miss that first ring, to not reach out and take hold of the bad choice, but it’s a chance you know will be denied and that these characters will most certainly open the door on the second ring. What’s behind the door is not mail delivery, but a fate carved deep into the walls of hell. “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” is one of the best opening sentences ever written. Simple though it is, it carries a lot of information.

The main character, Frank Chambers, telling his story in first person, with that one line has revealed all we need to know about him. He’s a loser, constantly cast aside by mainstream society. He’s someone on the edge, trying to get a free ride through life. And there’s something about him that makes certain people, those in the know, not want to have anything to do with him. They realize he’s, well, “wrong.” They can sense the shark under the water. The plot is simple as well. In fact, it’s boy meets girl. But the problem is the girl is married to a Greek named Nick Papadakis, an unattractive guy with an accent and a tourist court, a filling station, and a sandwich joint. The woman, Cora, though not classically attractive, has a hot body and a look about her that makes a man want to mash her lips. For Frank Chambers, she’s a walking, talking, sex-charged dream; she’s everything he’s ever wanted, and if the dice roll right, she comes with a sandwich shop. Cora is the fine, shiny, tasty-looking apple on the outside with the big fat worm in the middle.

She’s everything a mother fears for her son. She’s the hot patootie with her soul on ice. She’s just what Frank Chambers has been looking for when he’s thrown off that hay truck at noon and comes walking into Cora’s and Nick Papadakis’s life. As for Cora, Frank is what she’s been looking for, a big, handsome lug with all the willpower of a marionette; the only thing she needs to do is fasten the strings. Written so tightly that it squeaks like new shoes, the story shows Frank and Cora embracing their doom in their sleazy quest for easy money and minor position. Cain dramatizes their destruction step by relentless step, and it’s like watching someone walking down a railroad track with a train coming, lacking the will to step off. For Frank, it’s suicide by sex drive. For Cora, it’s suicide by greed. There’s real attraction between the two, but there’s no trust. The clock is set, and all we need to do is wait and watch until the alarm goes off.

I’ve always loved Chandler and Hammett and Hemingway, but over the years, I’ve come to think that Cain, with this novel and Double Indemnity, was the master of the lean mean writing machine, and that although his reputation is high, it might have been higher yet had he written fewer books that were weak specters of this perfect little gem. Where does mojo storytelling come from? How does one learn to spin yarns in any gen re, whether it be horror, suspense, science fiction, or western? First you need to see the world, like Joe R. Lansdale, who has lived most everywhere, if you count a small area of east Texas as everywhere. Second, you need to learn how to take a punch. Or a kick. Then, learn how to avoid them. (Lansdale has long been an ardent student of the martial arts.) The author of dozens of novels (including seven featuring the delightful Hap Collins and Leonard Pine) and several short story collections, Lansdale has been called “an immense talent” by Booklist.

The New York Times Book Review declares that he has “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.” He received numerous awards, among them the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker horror awards, a British Fantasy Award, the American Mystery Award, and two New York Times Notable Book citations. His novella “Bubba Hotep” was made into a film by the same name and is considered a cult classic. Lansdale lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, with his wife, Karen. [Editor’s Note: We are proud to announce today that Joe R. Lansdale is joining Mulholland Books. We will be publishing his novel The Edge of Dark Water in Fall 2011.] Excellent. Could hardly find a better writer to capture the core of Cain. Scott Nicholson Notes on film: Double Indemnity | Cinema Autopsy Notes on film: Double Indemnity “I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.” Not only is Double Indemnity one of the archetypal films known as film noir but it is regarded by many as the first true film noir. It is also one of the best.

The characters, scenario and stylistic elements of Double Indemnity all perfectly represent this group of Hollywood films from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The dark tone of Double Indemnity, both visually and thematically, the anti-hero who is led astray by greed and lust, and the seductive yet deadly femme fatale are all essential film noir ingredients. Film noir can trace its origins back to the violent and glamorous gangster films of the 1930s but also to the hardboiled crime fiction that emerged from the Depression that was characterised by witty, sardonic and creatively descriptive dialogue. Double Indemnity is filled with wonderful examples of this style of hardboiled dialogue and many of the early scenes between Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) are filled with suggestive, evocative and witty lines that the pair trade as if sparring with one another. Another characteristic of hardboiled fiction and film noir is the first person narrator, which Double Indemnity also incorporates.

It is hardly surprising that Double Indemnity is filled with some of the best examples of hardboiled language as two legends of hardboiled fiction contributed to the script. James M. Cain wrote the original novel, from which the film was adapted, and Raymond Chandler did the co-adaptation. Cain also wrote the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was adapted for the screen several times but most notably for director Tay Garnett’s 1946 film. Chandler’s contribution to the detective genre cannot be overstated and all his novels have been adapted for the screen, most notably the 1946 version of The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks. It is not easy to define film noir. Some regard it as a genre that adheres to particular stylistic and narrative devices while others argue that it is a stylistic movement that defines 1940s and 1950s America. The actual term film noir was not known to many American filmmakers of the time as the term originated from French critics who were the first to recognise the trend in Hollywood for making what translates literally into English as “black film”.

This label referred to the low-key lighting that is arguably the most defining feature of film noir and it is a key element of Double Indemnity‘s cinematography. Double Indemnity is an incredibly dark film with characters emerging from darkness, shadows obscuring the faces of the characters and a strong prevalence of Venetian blinds casting striped shadows over everything in shot. In Double Indemnity, and many other film noir, this use of shadows portrays the environment that the characters live in as dangerous and full of corruption, mystery and violence, inhabited by people with dubious motives and ambiguous morals. The dramatic lighting style that characterises film noir can be traced back to the German Expressionist films of the late 1910s to the early 1930s as many filmmakers who had been working in the German film industry came to Hollywood when the Nazis came to power. Double Indemnity director Billy Wilder, an Austrian born scriptwriter with Jewish ancestry, was one of these filmmakers. Double Indemnity was not Wilder’s first film as director but it was the one that established his career and he is still regarded today as one of the all time great directors. He later directed another defining film noir, Sunset Blvd.

(1950), plus other classics including the comedy Some Like It Hot (1959). The world of film noir reflects both the post World War II survival at all cost mentality plus the ruthless desire to overcome any obstacle by any means necessary to achieve the American Dream. Although film noir stories are often about a small time private detective who gets way out of his depth, the leading male character, as in the case of Double Indemnity, can also simply be an average guy who gets embroiled in a situation that he has no control over. He usually gets into this situation because his common sense and moral fibre go astray when he is tempted by money, a woman, or, as in the case of Double Indemnity, both. Fred MacMurray as insurance salesmen Walter Neff perfectly embodies the film noir hero who is a combination of kind-hearted softy, hopeless sap and ruthless murderer. Like most film noir heroes, he is doomed from the start. The final key element of any film noir is the femme fatale – the beautiful woman who entraps the hero with promises of money, sex and love, only to ultimately betray him.

Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal of Phyllis Dietrichson is still considered one of the all time great femme fatales as she perfectly embodies the seductress feigning helplessness who is gradually revealed to be manipulative and deadly. Her first scene perfectly captures her allure and dominance – she appears undressed at the top of the staircase looking down at Neff. She is a mix of sensuality and power and her verbal sparring with him establish her status as a force to be reckoned with. Interestingly, this depiction of sexually assertive women proved to be very popular with female audiences at the time. The femme fatale may be accused ultimately of being responsible for the downfall of the male hero, but for at least most of the film, women in the audience got to enjoy the depiction of a powerful woman who controls the situation. Nevertheless there were some film noirs at the time, plus the revisionist film noirs from the 1970s up to now, that challenge this portrayal by suggesting that it is obsessive and paranoid men who bring about their own downfall while the women get the blame.

The Complete Crime Stories: Amazon.co.uk: James M Cain: 9781504011327: Books The Complete Crime Stories Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Mysteriouspress.Com/Open Road (26 May 2015) Language: English Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.3 x 20.1 cm Average Customer Review: Product Description Review "Nobody else has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler.

Cain is a master of the change of pace." --Tom Wolfe "A poet of the tabloid murder." --Edmund Wilson "No one has ever stopped reading in the middle of one of Jim Cain's books." --"The Saturday Review of Literature" Nobody else has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler. Cain is a master of the change of pace. Tom Wolfe A poet of the tabloid murder. Edmund Wilson No one has ever stopped reading in the middle of one of Jim Cain s books. The Saturday Review of Literature" About the Author James M. Cain (1892 1977) was one of the most important authors in the history of crime fiction. Born in Maryland, he became a journalist after giving up on a childhood dream of singing opera. After two decades writing for newspapers in Baltimore, New York, and the army and a brief stint as the managing editor of theNew Yorker Cain moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s. While writing for the movies, he turned to fiction, penning the novellaThe Postman Always Rings Twice(1934).

This tightly wound tale of passion, murder, and greed became one of the most controversial bestsellers of its day, and remains one of the foremost examples of American noir writing. It set the tone for Cain s next few novels, includingSerenade(1937), Mildred Pierce(1941), Double Indemnity(1943), andThe Butterfly(1947). Several of his books became equally successful noir films, particularly the classic 1940s adaptations ofMildred PierceandDouble Indemnity. Cain moved back to Maryland in 1948. Though he wrote prolifically until his death, Cain remains most famous for his early work." What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item? James M. Cain James M(allahan) Cain (1892-1977) American journalist, screenwriter, and novelist, identified with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and others as a central member of hard-boiled school of crime fiction. However, James M. Cain's own opinion was "I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise".

Three of Cain's novels - The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which captured the downbeat atmosphere of the Depression, Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941) - were also made into classics of the American screen. His books continued to appear after World War II, but none gained the success of his earlier work. By his own admission, Cain considered himself first and foremost a journalist. "I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort." (Cain in preface to Double Indemnity) James Mallahan Cain was born in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of James W. Cain, a distinguished educator, and Rose Cain, an opera singer.

In 1903 the family moved to Chesterton, where his father served as President of Washington College. Cain attended the same college, earning his B.A. at the age of eighteen, and masters in 1917. For a period, Cain worked as a clerk, a meat-packer, a singer, and a teacher of English at the College's prep school. As a result of this stint, he became an expert on grammar and punctuation. In his spare time he wrote stories, sending them off to magazines, and getting all of them back. During the last year of World War I he served in the U.S. Army as the editor of the 79th Division newspaper Lorraine Cross in France. Decades later he returned to his war experiences in the short story 'Taking of Mountfaucon'. "And what we was walking over was all shell holes and barbed wire, and you was always slipping down and busting your shin, and then all them dead horses and things was laying around, and you didn't never see one till you had your foot in it, and then it made you sick. And dead men.

The first one we seen was in a trench, kind of laying up against the side, what was on a slant. And he was sighting down his gun just like he was getting ready to pull the trigger, and when you come to him you opened your mouth to beg his pardon for bothering him. And then you didn't." After the war Cain was employed by the Baltimore American (1917-18) as a police reporter, and then by The Baltimore Sun (1919-23), where he covered political and industrial strife in the West Virginia. His reporting of the trial of William Blizzard, a young coal miner, gained national recognition. Blizzard was being tried for his role in miner's rebellion. Cain's work was noticed by the editors of The Atlantic Monthly and H.L. Mencken of the Sun newspapers. In spite of Mencken discouragement, Cain took a leave of absence from The Sun, and spent some time trying to write his Great American Novel, which revolved around a taboo subject, incest. From 1923 to 1924 Cain was Professor of Journalism at St. John's College, Annapolis.

After two semesters Cain lost his job in a dispute with the president of St. John's. In addition, his marriage came apart and he was confined for a period to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Sabillasville, Maryland. In 1924 he became the editorial writer for the New York World under Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). Cain conducted a column which formed the basis for Our Government (1930), a sharp analysis of the American policy. In 1928 H.L. Mencken, Cain's mentor and friend, whom he met while working for the Baltimore American, published in American Mercury his story 'Pastorale'. Menken called Cain "the most competent writer the country ever produced". Following the end of the New York World, where Cain wrote acclaimed editorials, he joined in 1931 New Yorker staff. However, he found the environment uncongenial and moved to Hollywood after Paramount Studios offered him $400 a week, compared to the $200 he made at the New Yorker. "...

there was a bit of a gap between what went on in his mind and what came out of his mouth," Cain said of Harold Ross, the editor and founder of the magazine. B.A. Bergman, who worked for the Hearst syndicate, hired him to write a regular column for $85-a-week, but Hearst did not like Cain and forced Bergman to discontinue the column. Virtually it meant that his career as a journalist came to a halt. It was not until his 80s, when Cain started writing articles again for The Washington Post. From 1932 to 1947 Cain lived in Southern California writing for films, although his original contract at Paramount lasted only six months. In Hollywood Cain was never hailed as a great screenwriter but he was know for his wickedly sharp ear for dialogue. Raymond Chandler called him "a Proust in greasy overalls". His short stories were published in such magazines as the American Mercury, Redbook, Esquire, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of these pieces were collected in The Baby in the Icebox (1981). Cain secured writing credit only on three films.

His most important works, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, were adapted for the screen by other writers. Cain's style was sparse, and he believed that it was the way novels should be written at the time of the Depression. Disgusted by Hollywood's treatment of writers, he launched a campaign with the left wing of the Screen Writers Guild to set up American Authors' Authority to protect the copyrights of all writers and to seek better deals with the studios. Though Cain had been little interested in social criticism, at least in his novels, this society was denounced as a bureaucratic and Stalinist threat by James T. Farrell, who had been active in the Trotskyist movement. The original title of The Postman Always Rings Twice was Bar-B-Q, but Cain's publisher, Alfred Knopf, disliked it – there was no postman in the story; it was an eternal triangle drama with a femme fatale, foolish husband and a greedy lover. The protagonist is a California drifter, Frank Chambers, who falls in love with Cora Papadakis, the wife of a diner owner. "Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes.

Except for the shape, she really wasn't any ravaging beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips struck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her." Frank and Cora murder the husband and make his death look like accident. Cora dies in a car crash and ironically Frank is convicted of murder for her accidental death. The book, which was based loosely on an actual case, was daring enough to be banned in Canada and Boston, and to arise a trial for obscenity. A Broadway version was closed after 72 performances in 1936. Luchino Visconti's unauthorized adaptation of the novel, entitled Ossessione (1942), was his first film as a director. Visconti had been assistant director on three of Jean Renoir 's production's, and the camera style of the French director can be seen in this film, too. Made while Mussolini was still in power, Ossessione's world of gloom and corruption was banned by the censors.

Morever, there was the copyright problem, and the film was not exhibited outside Italy until 1958, when it was revived and recognized as a precurser of Italian Neo-Realism. Lana Turner played Cora in Tay Garnett's film version from 1946. The screenplay was written by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch. Cain was impressed with Turner's performance, saying it was even finer than he had expected. The 1981 remake with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange was more faithful to the book than Garnett's adaptation. Nicholson did not soften his character, Frank. "He's a sadist who solves every problem with violence," Nicholson once said in an interview. "I don't particularly want a guy who murders a man the fucks his wife on top of her husband's body to be all that charming." The sex scenes arose much attention in the United States, where the film was dismissed by the critics and failed at the box office, but in other countries it was a hit. Double Indemnity, a tale of an adulterous couple who try to commit the perfect insurance murder, appeared in abridged form as an eight-part serial in Liberty (1936) magazine.

Cain used some detail for his work from the 1927 Snyder/Gray murder case. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, a corset-salesman, murdered Albert Snyder - they used window-sash weight, chloroform, and picture wire. The murder weapons attracted much attention when they were put on display at the New York Police Academy. In Cain's story Phyllis Nirdlinger seduces Walter Huff, a salesman with General Fidelity in Los Angeles. Her husband signs his policy application and Walter kills him, but stages it as suicide. Walter's boss Keyes has his own suspicions about the whole matter. Walter finds Nirdlinger's daughter Lola attractive and plans to shoot Phyllis, but she tries to get him first. Lola and her boyfriend are blamed. Walter confesses all to Keyes, who secretly arranges them on the same cruise, where he expects they will kill each other. Huff, like Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice, is caught in a trap by sex and violence. The story was filmed by Billy Wilder, who hired Raymond Chandler to write the script.

Cain also participated in story conference and wrote: "A young guy named Joe Sistrom was Paramount's producer on the picture... He sat there unhappily in a sulk and then suddenly said, "All characters in B pictures are too smart." I never forgot it. It was a curious observation, putting into words – vivid, rememberable words – a principle that when a character is too smart, convenient to the author's purposes, everything begins getting awfully slack in the story, and slick. Slack is one fault and slick is another. Both are bad faults in a story." (in On Sunset Boulevard by Ed Sikov, 1998) Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder (1944), starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, screenplay by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder, cinematographer John F. Seitz. Wilder first offered the role of corrupt insurance man to Alan Ladd and George Raft. The director signed Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay for him. Charles Brackett with whom he had worked earlier, did not want to touch the book. Chandler altered the story, changed names, and used flashback.

"...Cain's dialogue in his fiction in written to the eye," Chadler explained. "Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's dialogue it in the same spirit as he has in the book, and not the identically same words." Cain's comment was generous: "It's the only picture I ever saw made from my books that had things in it I wish I had thought of. Wilder's ending was much better than my ending, and his device for letting the guy tell the story by taking out the office dictating machine – I would have done it if I had thought of it. There are situations in the movie that can make your hands get wet." (On Sunset Boulevard by Ed Sikov, 1998) In the original ending to the film, MacMurray is convicted for murder and Robinson witnesses his death at a gas chamber in San Quentin. The game between a self-assured male protagonist and a cunning woman has inspired such directors as Robert Siodmark (The Killers, 1946), Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, 1947), and Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, 1981).

Cain's novel Mildred Pierce was also filmed, and won an Oscar for Joan Crawford. Cain's book centered on a ambitious career woman, who loses her wealth through the intrigues of her ex-husband, her partner, and selfish daughter. The story is told in a third-person narration, but Cain later confessed that it did not suit him - his book did not have the right bite. The protagonist is portrayed mostly in sympathetic light in spite of her hard character. Michael Curtiz's film adaptation from 1945 is essentially a film noire, "where it's a woman, Crawford, rather than a man, who is led by a greedy, manipulative, evil femme fatale – in this case, the woman's daughter, Blyth – down a fatalistic path of deception, money for greedy people, murder, and doom (only here an optimistic ending is added)." (Danny Peary in Guide for the Film Fanatic, 1986) Love was a constant source of troubles in Cain's novels and his personal life from the beginning of his career. His divorces cost much money and he had occasionally difficulties in paying the bills.

When the newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst made it known that he did not like Cain, that source of income was cut off. It was not until in his 80s, when Cain began writing articles again for The Washington Post. Cain's marriage in 1920 to Mary Rebecca Clough, his childhood sweetheart who worked as a teacher, dissolved three years later. He then married in 1927 Elina Sj�sted Tyszecka, whom he had met by accident in New York one night. She was of Finnish origin and had two children from her previous marriage. Cain fell for her wildly, "on basis of a pretty face and Finnish gravity," as he recalled. "She had a beautiful mind – sardonic, ironic, and sometimes almost savage in its comprehensions of basic things. That helped a lot with the kind writing I did." They divorced in 1942, but Cain had a very positive relationship with the children. Cain's third wife (1944-1945) was Aileen Pringle, a silent-screen star, who was acquainted with Mencken. "A very amusing move gal," he had called her.

After divorce Cain married in 1947 the opera singer Florence Macbeth Whitwell (died, 1966). Leaving California, they settled in Hyattsville, Maryland, where Cain remained for the rest of his life. Cain's works from the late 1940s onward include Butterfly (1947), a story of incest, illegitimacies, and murder in Kentucky, The Moth (1948), his personal favorite set in Baltimore, and historical novels Past All Hishonor (1946), and Mignon (1965), set in the years after the Civil War. While not writing, Cain occupied himself with the study of Shakespeare's sonnets and classical music. He had dreamed in his youth of becoming a singer, but his mother had told him that that he did not have a grand opera voice nor the temperament needed. In 1970 Cain was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. James M.Cain died of a heart attack on October 27, 1977, in University Park, Maryland.

Shortly before his death, Cain finished the novel The Coctail Waitress, which was not published until 2012. The narrator is a newly widowed woman, who, to pay the bills, takes a job as a waitress. She becomes the object of desire of two very different men, an old widower, whom she marries, and a young dreamer, whom she cannot resist. To clear her name of accusations of being a femme fatale who knew ways of murdering a husband without a shred of evidence, she tells her own story. The published novel was drawn together by the editor Charles Ardai from multiple manuscripts. "This book is not vintage Cain, but it is Cain nevertheless, and that makes it a worthwhile read," said Michael Connelly in his review (The New York Times, September 21, 2012). Cain generally preferred a first-person narrator, avoided moralizing, and his characters were often self-destructive, or used by stronger women. Many stories were set in Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb.

An admirer of the short-story writer and sports reporter Ring Lardner, he imitated Lardner's style in 'Icebox' (1933), which made into a film undder the title She Made Her Bed. In France Cain was regarded as one of the most important American writers. The Postman Always Rings Twice is said to have inspired Albert Camus ' existential novel The Outsider. Noteworthy, Raymond Chandler was not very enthusiastic about Cain and wrote (unjustifiably) to his publisher: "James Cain – faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way." For further reading: Literature and Morality by J.T. Farrell (1947); Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed.

by David Madden; see: Joyce Carol Oates (1968); Cain by David Madden (1970); 'Double Indemnity: A Policy That Paid Off' by John Allyn, in Literature/Film Quarterly, 6:2 (1978); Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain by Roy Hoopes (1982); 'James M. Cain: Playwright and Novelist – In That Order', in 60 Years of Journalism by James M. Cain, ed. by Roy Hoopes (1985); Cain by R. Hoopes (1987); James M. Cain by P. Skenazy (1989); The Crime Novel by T. Hilfer (1990); On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder by Ed Sikov (1998); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 2oth Century, Vol 1., ed. Steven R. Serafin (1999); James M. Cain: Hard-Boiled Mythmaker by David Madden and Kristopher Mecholsky (2011) Selected bibliography:

Question: The films 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' and 'Double Indemnity' were both based on novels written by which author of hardboiled school of American crime fiction?
Answer: JAMES M. CAIN