The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories

by Cain, James M.; Polito, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780375414381
• ISBN10: 037541438X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-07-22
• Publisher: EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY

Summary

These three classics from the master of the noir novel, along with five otherwise unavailable short stories, are electric with the taut narrative voice, the suspense, and the explosive violence and eroticism that were James M. Cain's indelible hallmarks. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain's first noveltried for obscenity in Boston, the inspiration for Camus's The Strangeris the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an obsessional passion, and into a murder. Double Indemnitywhich followed Postman so quickly, Cain's readers hardly had a chance to catch their breathis a tersely narrated story of a blind, excessive love, duplicity, and, of course, murder. Mildred Pierce, a work of acute psychological observation and devastating emotional violence, is the tale of a woman with a taste for shiftless men and an unreasoned devotion to her monstrous daughter. All three novels were immortalized in classic Hollywood films. Also included here are five masterful stories"Pastorale," "The Baby in the Icebox," "Dead Man," "Brush Fire," "The Girl in the Storm"that have been out of print for decades.

Author Biography

James Mallahan Cain (1892 - 1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for The Cross of Lorraine, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literay career that included a professorship at St. John's College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The story of a young hobo who has an affair with a married woman and plots with her to murder her husband and collect his insurance, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Cain published eighteen books in all and was working on his autobiography at the time of his death.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Select Bibliography
Chronology
The Postman Always Rings Twice	p. 1
Double Indemnity	p. 107
Mildred Pierce	p. 217
'Pastorale'	p. 519
'The Baby in the Ice Box'	p. 531
'Dead Man'	p. 553
'Brush Fire'	p. 569
'The Girl in the Storm'	p. 581
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

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 axial figure 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 Holly