The Postman Always Rings Twice
— 1934 —
New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992; 116 pages
FIRST LINES
They threw me off the hay truck about noon. I had swung on the night before, down at the border, and as soon as I got up there under the canvas, I went to sleep. I needed plenty of that, after three weeks in Tia Juana, and I was still getting it when they pulled off to one side to let the engine cool. Then they saw a foot sticking out and threw me off. I tried some comical stuff, but all I got was a dead pan, so that gag was out. They gave me a cigarette, though, and I hiked down the road to find something to eat.
PLOT SUMMARY
Can you say “noir”? How about “hard-boiled”?
Along with contemporaries Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain embodied the genre in a first novel that helped define a category in fiction and film. The staccato dialogue of cynical characters, the dark mood, sexual tension, and sudden violence Cain employed, are hallmarks of the “hard-boiled” or “noir” style.
Set in Depression-era California, Cain’s highly compact story of adultery and murder wastes no time on preliminaries or a slow buildup. Frank Chambers is one of those Depression-era drifters, tramping from city to city, always on the verge of trouble. One day, he stops at the filling station and roadside diner owned by Nick Papadakis. Then he sets eyes on Cora, Nick’s wife. One look and Frank takes up Nick’s offer of a job.
“From now on, it would be business between her and me,” Frank says. “She might not say yes, but she wouldn’t stall me. She knew what I meant, and she knew I had her number.” And it is not long before the two of them are plotting to be rid of Nick.
Cain’s book crackles with erotic electricity. When Cora tells Frank, “Rip me! Rip me!” it was sensational enough to help earn the book an obscenity trial in Boston. But in those days, publishers knew “Banned in Boston” made good promotional copy.
Does Frank love Cora enough to do what she wants? When he kisses her, “it was like being in church.” Just how far will the lovers go?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JAMES M. CAIN
James Mallahan Cain was born on July 1, 1892, in Annapolis, Maryland. His father was president of Washington College, from which Cain graduated in 1910. His mother was a singer and Cain also had ambitions to sing. “My mother told me I didn’t have the voice,” he said. “She was right, but she could have kept her flap shut and let me find out for myself.” Singers gone astray would later figure in some of his books.
Cain started as a newspaperman and, during World War I, wrote for a U.S. Army newspaper in France. He would eventually work under three legendary editors: H. L. Mencken in Baltimore, Walter Lippman of the New York World, and briefly Harold Ross of the New Yorker.
After his first short story was published in the American Mercury, Cain set out for Hollywood. He “stayed there for 17 years,” John Leonard wrote in Cain’s obituary, “marrying four women and divorcing three, ‘trying to drink up Hollywood,’ and writing the four novels on which his reputation rests.”
The first of these was The Postman Always Rings Twice, published when he was forty-two years old. Considered obscene in 1934, it was a commercial sensation. Cain followed with Double Indemnity (first serialized in 1936), Serenade (1937), and Mildred Pierce (1941). Hollywood later turned both Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce into film classics, but The Postman was untouchable under Hollywood’s rigid morals code. Only after the first two successes did The Postman Always Rings Twice make it to the big screen in 1946 with Lana Turner and John Garfield as the torrid murderous couple. It was remade in 1981 with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange as the leads.
Cain’s later work does not rival his earlier triumphs. But in 1969, the three books considered his best—The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce—were reissued in a single volume, spawning a major revival of interest in his work. James M. Cain died of a heart attack at age eighty-five on October 27, 1977, in University Park, Maryland.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
I confess, I am a sucker for this genre and cut my teeth by reading—or watching—a great many of the classic stories by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cain. The clipped pacing, amoral intrigues, gritty settings, and tough-guy dialogue are all hallmarks of a deeply influential style.
Even if now slightly dated, and perhaps diminished because Cain’s writing has been mimicked by generations of imitators, The Postman Always Rings Twice remains a classic. In its quick tempo, high sexual tension, and violence—although fairly demure by modern standards—Cain’s first novel deals with themes that fascinate many great fiction writers: lust, ambition, greed, and murder. But the author once argued, “There’s more violence in ‘Hamlet’ than in all my books. I write love stories, and about the wish that terrifies.”
Cain does it in hard-hitting, no-nonsense prose that has no pretense of literary high-mindedness. He once commented:
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… has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.
There is no literal “Postman” in the novel. The message is that you may miss the Postman—fate, bad news, or worse—the first time. But there is no escaping the second. The Stranger by Albert Camus (see entry) is said to have been inspired by The Postman. The novel also provided the unattributed source of Luchino Visconti’s film Ossessione (1943), an early Italian neorealist classic.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Cain’s two other best works fit into the Great Short Books category, so it’s easy to try them both. Double Indemnity, first serialized as a Depression-era tale of adultery and murder for insurance money, was based on a true story Cain had covered as a reporter in New York. Mildred Pierce is also a Depression-era story, of a woman who uses her wiles—and pie-baking skills—to escape poverty and an unemployed husband. But she can’t escape her relationship with a scheming and somewhat monstrous daughter, Veda, an aspiring opera singer. The 1945 film version departed from Cain’s original story, while a recent HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet is more faithful to Cain’s plot.