Product Description

First published in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice caused a scandal with its explosive mix of violence and sex, and immediately became a bestseller. The torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41692 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Synopsis
First published in 1934, The Postman Always Rings Twice caused a scandal with its explosive mix of violence and sex, and immediately became a bestseller. The torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.

About the Author
James M. Cain was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1892. Having served in the US Army in World War 1, he became a journalist in Baltimore and New York in the 1920's. He later worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Cain died in 1977

Customer Reviews

A quick read
This slight book is so gripping chances are you'll read it one go. Masterfully written, this is lean writing by a writer who obviously find writing come easily, and with considerable urgency. It's interesting to compare the 3 films made of this, and I'd go with Visconti's version as being the best.

Disturbing
Some books are just straight disturbing - this is one of them.

I initially thought it was only a tacky thrill getter - bit of sex, bit of violence and a `tough talking dude' - but once I broke through that (and it did take some breaking through) I realized this is quite a well written book.

It is about violence - it is about alienation - it is about deprivation and emotional screw-up: It is about justice and the perverseness of morality.

That is a pretty strong cocktail, and the language, of necessity, is harsh, unforgiving and downright brutal at points.

So too the plot - with an economy to be admired, there is an attempted murder, a successful murder and an accident resulting in another kind of murder ... all in the space of around 120 pages.

Women get slapped around - and like it: Men get beaten-up - and don't. It is the `film-noire' world beloved of the gangster genre. But this is not a gangster book.

The chief character is a drifter - he bums around America - scratching a living here, stealing there, spending short periods in jail before moving on.

He drifts into a situation where his animal driven lusts and craftiness allow access to what I am tempted to say is a perfect partner for him. There is the problem of her husband - and their attempt to remove him forms the spine of the story.

But, `As flies to wanton boys ... `

The God's agents are the forces of law and order - who are playing a game with lesser mortals. Any sense of justice or basic human decency is soon swept away once we encounter the petty motives fuelling both defence and prosecution.

I have to admit, I am reminded of Tess, of Lear and Heathcliffe ... pretty strong company for a pot-boiler to evoke.

Still disarmingly fresh after 70 years
I have come late to the world of James M Cain, having found him amongst the interviewees in "The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1" itself one of the must-reads of 2007. I'm sure I was not alone in knowing him only by virtue of those novels which have been successfully transposed onto the big screen.

Even allowing for the fact that his style has been much imitated since, his texts still leave the reader reeling from the casual and callous brutality which inhabits the social sub-stratum in which his characters move. Like his contemporary Runyon, with whom he shares a similar style, Cain began life as a journalist and that discipline must be credited for honing his prose as well as serving up the seeds of some of his best stories.

There's even less about postmen in this novel than there is about cuckoos in Ken Kesey's masterwork, Cain instead taking the staple of the love triangle and overlaying a morally empty tragedy of his own making. His crisp, unsparing dialogue moves the story - at 116 pages really a novella - at a fast pace and brings the reader uncomfortably close to the anxieties which spring from his protagonists' criminal escapades.

The age of the story is only betrayed in Cain's attitude towards women and racial minority groups and that aspect of this work only serves to illustrate the speed of progress on that front in the twentieth century.