Twenty Three. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
1934, Everyman’s Library, 136 pages. Written in English, read in English.
(Medium are making me clarify issues regarding possible affiliate links in my articles so please read this.)
Technical note: I’ve been reading the Everyman’s Library Essential 100 series in order. Some of the books in the series are actually collection of novels, provided as such due to the original novels’ brevity (such as in this case), or because it makes more sense to bind all novels together (such as in the case of Updike’s Rabbit quadrology, which I will get to at a much later stage). I have decided that for the purposes of Sixty Books, each novel will be counted as a single book if it was originally published as such. In this particular case (and in several other cases in the Everyman’s Library canon), there are several novels bound together with several short stories. I will be reading, and commenting on, if relevant, the introduction along with the first novel, and the short stories along with the last novel.
The whole purpose of Everyman’s Library’s 100 Essentials collection is to provide you with a list of 100 books that you must read, because they have been pillars of, or changed the course of, literature history. Most, if not all, of the names in that series were at least familiar. James M. Cain was not. I had no idea who he was going into this book, but the names of the novels did ring a bell — The Postman Always Rings Twice (which I’m writing about here) and Double Indemnity (which I will write about in a later stage) were known to me as names of movies. I did not know they were based on books.
The introduction explains why Cain is part of this series very clearly. He single-handed, it explains, created the bridge between the noir novel which is focused on the detective, and the noir novel which is focused on the criminal, and several modern thriller authors owe him their careers.
Cain writes in a very down to earth manner. His characters, his protagonists, are ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances which encourage them to commit crimes. The Postman Always Rings Twice, which title has no bearing on the novel itself but is related to a trial that Cain has covered as a journalist, and that has inspired this novel, has three such characters — the narrator, Frank Chambers, is a drifter, one of many in 1930’s United States. He finds himself in a roadside tavern somewhere in California, trying to con a meal out of the proprietor, a Greek immigrant named Nik Papadakis, and his wife, Cora. The wife wants to kill the husband, or the drifter tries to convince the wife to kill the husband, or vice versa. It is never made clear in the novel, which is part of its power. Eventually they succeed in killing the husband, making it look like an automobile accident, but this is where the interesting part of the novel starts, with a trial, a discovery of a double indemnity insurance policy (the fact that Cain has another novel called Double Indemnity is not a coincidence), and an ultimate penance (because the book was written in the 1930’s and crime did not pay in those times). The novel is supposed to be a sort of confession made by the protagonist, which accounts for its terse prose, and is very effective in that way.
The novel is a gripping tale of an ongoing downward spiral, replacing an almost innocent transgression with a more elaborate one, small evils with much larger evils and betrayals with double and triple betrayals. It makes you unsure of what you’ve just read (I’ve had to go back and read several paragraph to make sure I was still on track of who was trying to trick who and why), it makes you eager to understand how the story ends for Frank and Cora and why it ends that way, and worse, and most wonderful of all, it makes you feel like an accomplice.
And a little more than one hundred pages later, I understand why this book is in the 100 Essentials list. The two additional novels here darkly loom in the future, and I can’t wait to hear what dark Californian passages Cain goes on to illuminate there.
