The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain

Readers of both The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Cain’s Double Indemnity (serialized in 1936), will be alarmed to find on their two first pages these iterations: “It was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California”; “It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California”. Both are tales of adulterous amour, fou and foolhardy, where big insurance payouts lie on the other side of treacherous violence, ways out of horribly normal and middle class Californian life. Both are colloquial first person narratives, revealed very late to be written as confessions by their narrators, which then switch to the present tense for the final approach of what can only be called doom. When Cain repeats himself in his scene setting, it is a case of doing what he knows works, or of acknowledging the longer repetitions with a deliberate echo, or both. The important difference in the two openings is that the house in Double Indemnity, while architecturally undistinguished, is as Cain has already told us on the first page the “House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers.” Both stories seem to have drawn from the 1927 case of Ruth Snyder, who conspired with a lover to kill her husband, but only Double Indemnity plays this trick so that it can purport to detail and color some outlined true story. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a little more like a dream.

This, Cain’s first novella, is slightly over a hundred pages, like Double Indemnity. He had worked as a journalist in the 20s and the first half of the 30s, and had published some short stories and a collection of sketches and dramatic monologues, Our Government. The Postman Always Rings Twice has a famous and violent opening, in which its narrator wakes up: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” The transient, Frank Chambers, is a small time criminal who soon takes a mechanic’s job at a roadside diner with a filling station outside Los Angeles, with an immigrant, Nick Papadakis, as his boss, and the wife, Cora, with her “sulky look” just visible in the kitchen from his post outside. Frank talks Nick into a trip to the city for a new neon sign, and gets together with Cora, who talks him into killing Nick. One attempt at the perfect murder fails—though it does not implicate them—Frank and Cora run off, she bails and returns to Nick, and he returns to them. A hit on the head has made Nick sentimental, and now he wants a child, but Cora “can’t have no greasy Greek child”, she says, so they come up with a second plan, this one so “lousy” it won’t look like murder, because surely no one would ever try it that way. With Nick dead, and some money coming in, they have some options, but then they mess everything up.

Raymond Chandler has the bigger and better reputation, but his voice, its celebrated cynicism, is contrived, whereas Cain’s seems to have got that way all by itself. There’s no decorum or distance from the action; he uses a lot of slang, and a lot of casual constructions. But one doesn’t really know how he does it. Even the best talky styles in American fiction, the long monologues by Alexander Portnoy, Augie March, or Holden Caulfield, have a bit of self-conscious stiffness, like they’re telling you to look how casual all this is. With Cain, it is as if he gets in character, speaks, and the words appear on the page. There is no pesky congress of competing interests, no murmuring opposition getting in the way between the dictator and the decree:

That’s the way it went. That’s the way it went all evening. The Greek got out some of his sweet wine, and sang a bunch of songs, and we sat around, and so far as she was concerned, I might just as well have been just a guy that used to work there, only she couldn’t quite remember his name.”

As with his complaints about California, Cain is not afraid to repeat himself here: the first two sentences, obviously, and the word “just” twice, clunkily, in the penultimate clause. An appraisal of Cain from Edmund Wilson—“A poet of the tabloid murder”—appears on many editions of his fiction, but it’s partly the clanging repetitions that give the passage its momentum: a poetry of faultiness.

Frank tells his story very briskly, and we learn at the end that this is necessary. The sense that he is speaking to us urgently, already there but made more intense in the final pages, is uncomfortable. In chapters nine through eleven, in which Frank and Cora are questioned and tried, there is a lot of clever legal procedure to get through, and we lose this immediacy as Frank has to reproduce long explanations from a very crafty lawyer. When they get off and return to run the diner, they have a bit of infamy from the case, which helps business, and Cora wants to expand the operation with what she’ll call a beer garden. We’re taken back into Frank’s confidence, but Cain also has them talk the plans over for a long time given how short the novel is. After the dreadful excitement of the case, there is a routine, money to think about, and something like a marriage to maintain. And here is an author who will write about how things work without worrying too much about what they mean, who much later, with the latitude of a proper length novel in Mildred Pierce (1941), would get into a lot of detail about his determined heroine’s restaurant-running and pie-mongering. It is this stuff which makes The Postman Always Rings Twice more than a dream, this marital chatter, awfully honest and deviled by the details. (In Double Indemnity, the plot is always running apace, so Phillis and Walter never have this kind of conversation.) Cora wants to stay, make more money, and in her words, “be something”, while Frank wants to get away from Nick’s place and live on the road without responsibilities, but she doesn’t buy that Frank is bothered about what they’ve done and says that he’s just a “bum”, and he doesn’t disagree. He knew that she was rotten, knows now that they aren’t completely loyal to each other, but he keeps giving in. They talk about installing coils for draught beer and she says she saw some nice tall glasses in Los Angeles that they could use to serve the beer. The mundane turning out to be monstrous is a cliché, done many times since Cain was writing; the monster talking about the mundane can still be creepy.