{"product_id":"the-postman-always-rings-twice-double-indemnity-mildred-pierce-and-selected-stories-isbn-9780375414381","title":"The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories","description":"\u003cb\u003eThese 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eCain’s  first novel–the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston, the inspiration for Camus’s \u003ci\u003eThe Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e–is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into  an erotic obsession, and into a murder. \u003ci\u003eDouble Indemnity\u003c\/i\u003e–which followed \u003ci\u003ePostman\u003c\/i\u003e so  quickly, Cain’s readers hardly had a chance to catch their breath–is a tersely narrated  story of blind passion, duplicity, and, of course, murder. \u003ci\u003eMildred Pierce\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.“[James M. Cain is] a poet of the tabloid murder.” –Edmund Wilson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Nobody has quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler.” –Tom Wolfe\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Mr. Cain is a real writer who can construct and tell an exciting story with dazzling swiftness . . . [his] work has a fast rhythm that is art.” –\u003ci\u003eSaturday Review of Literature \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Cain can get down to the primary impulses of greed and sex in fewer words than any writer we know of.” –\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003eJames 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Cross of Lorraine\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain's famous first novel, \u003cb\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u003c\/b\u003e, 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, \u003cb\u003eThe Stranger\u003c\/b\u003e. 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, \u003cb\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u003c\/b\u003e is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain's other novels, \u003cb\u003eMildred Pierce\u003c\/b\u003e (1941) and \u003cb\u003eDouble Indemnity\u003c\/b\u003e (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.\u003cp\u003eI 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach of my writer friends spoke of Cain with a sort of shiver in her  voice, variously intimating the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eDouble  Indemnity\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSerenade\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eMildred Pierce \u003c\/i\u003ealso 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCain ultimately didn’t \u003ci\u003einvent \u003c\/i\u003eanything. 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Great Gatsby \u003c\/i\u003e(1925) Ernest Hemingway’s  ‘The Killers’ (1927), and William Faulkner’s \u003ci\u003eSanctuary \u003c\/i\u003e(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 \u003ci\u003eStudies in Classic American  Literature \u003c\/i\u003eglanced 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 \u003ci\u003etrying \u003c\/i\u003eto be extreme. The great Americans  I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them today.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChandler 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’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur 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 \u003ci\u003eThe  Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e. The film and sound editor Walter Murch told Michael Ondaatje in \u003ci\u003eThe Conversations \u003c\/i\u003ethat, ‘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:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"They threw me off the hay truck about noon.\" --\u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always  Rings Twice \u003c\/i\u003e(1936)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery  company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland.\"  --\u003ci\u003eDouble Indemnity \u003c\/i\u003e(1936)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I was in the Tupinamba, having a \u003ci\u003ebizcocho \u003c\/i\u003eand coffee, when this girl came  in.\" --\u003ci\u003eSerenade \u003c\/i\u003e(1937)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"All this, that I’m going to tell you, started several years  ago.\" —\u003ci\u003eCareer in C Major \u003c\/i\u003e(1938)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"I first met her when she came over to the house  one night, after calling me on the telephone and asking if she could see me on a  matter of business.\"  —\u003ci\u003eThe Embezzler \u003c\/i\u003e(1948)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale,  California, a man was bracing trees.\" --\u003ci\u003eMildred Pierce \u003c\/i\u003e (1941)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA concoction of carnality  and California, highways, cars, fast food, and lunges at stardom, this Cain universe  is insistently tangible, rooted in objects and work, fascinated by road signs, tabloids,  radio, and insurance tables, yet tilting toward fable, even surrealism. Recall the  puma who appears in court at the end of \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u003c\/i\u003e, or the nightmare  phantasmagoria in \u003ci\u003eDouble Indemnity\u003c\/i\u003e, as Phyllis emerges panting across the dark rails,  hoisting her dead husband. The women are enterprising, sometimes viewed as rapacious,  sometimes as diabolic, and the men rarely as smart or bold as their desires, and  all the mortals are restless. Defensive, anxious about their class, race, money,  or achievement, Cain’s people slenderly know themselves, much as Cain once said he  could only write well by assuming another’s voice. ‘There’s something very peculiar  about me that I don’t understand,’ he told his biographer, Roy Hoopes. ‘I cannot  write in the third person — and it seems to have something to do with this sense  of a lack of accomplishment. I have written three books in the third person and they  came off all right, but did not have the bite of the others . . . Now, when I write  in the first person, that’s different. But to write anything, I have to pretend to  be somebody else.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSometime between November 1931, when he quit journalism and  the East Coast for Los Angeles and the movies, and the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Postman  Always Rings Twice \u003c\/i\u003eby Knopf early in 1934, Cain arrived at the cunning, bluff and  skittish style that is one of the indelible feats of American noir.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJames Mallahan  Cain was born at the opposite end of the American psychic topography from southern  California, in Colonial Annapolis, Maryland, on 1 July 1892. All his grandparents  had emigrated from Ireland during the 1850s, settling in New Haven, Connecticut.  His father, James W. Cain, a Yale graduate, taught mathematics and English literature  at St John’s College in Annapolis. His mother, Rose Mallahan, was a trained lyric  soprano, with ‘the Brunnhilde voice’, as Cain later evoked her. Living in an ivy-covered  brick faculty residence on the St John’s campus, the Cains maintained a cultured  household for Jamie (as he called himself until he started school) and his four siblings,  a brother and three sisters. Both his parents were attractive and popular, and his  father,\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003enot so much a scholar as a wily academic operator who eventually assumed  the presidency of Washington College, across the Bay in Chestertown, appears to have  intimidated his son. A ‘handsome, gabby, likeable rake’, as Cain recalled in an unpublished  memoir, his father ‘mold[ed] all three of his weaknesses, his love of drink, his  love of talk, and his fear of work, into one pillar of massive strength’. By contrast,  the recurrently double-promoted Cain entered college at age fourteen, and although  tall he described himself there as a ‘a midget among giants’. His face pockmarked  under a helmet of unruly hair, he was nicknamed ‘Pedro’ and designated in the senior  yearbook as ‘the awkwardest man of the class’.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter he graduated Washington College  in 1910, at age seventeen, Cain drifted into odd jobs around Maryland — copying ledgers  for Consolidated Gas and Light of Baltimore; inspecting roads for the State Roads  Commission; principal of a high school in Vienna — before he moved to Washington,  D.C. to pursue a calling as a singer. He financed his singing lessons, selling insurance  for the general Accident Company — stocking information that would backdrop his novels \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice \u003c\/i\u003eand, particularly, \u003ci\u003eDouble Indemnity\u003c\/i\u003e. His status as  a failed singer stayed a conspicuous plank in Cain’s private mythology. ‘Writing  to me,’ he told Edmund Wilson, ‘was distinctly a consolation prize’, but the singing  lessons lasted only the single summer of 1914 before they ceased. Music is everywhere  in Cain — who else would represent the murder of Nick Papadakis in \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always  Rings Twice \u003c\/i\u003eas the stopped echo of a high note? But for all his fascination for classical  music, Cain could never portray singers convincingly. \u003ci\u003eMildred Pierce \u003c\/i\u003enearly skips  the rails when, after perhaps six months of vocal training, Veda suddenly emerges  on the radio as a ‘miracle voice’ coloratura soprano. John Howard Sharp in \u003ci\u003eSerenade \u003c\/i\u003eis scarcely more plausible when he discusses his music. Manny Farber once praised  Samuel Fuller’s scripts as ‘grotesque jobs that might have been written by the bus  driver in \u003ci\u003eThe Honeymooners\u003c\/i\u003e’. Sharp is Ralph Kramden as an opera star — at least Kramden’s  fantasy of an opera star. Sharp, for instance, performs \u003ci\u003eCarmen \u003c\/i\u003e— cold — at the Hollywood  Bowl, after the scheduled singer falters:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eYou think that’s impossible, that a man  can go on and sing stuff that he never even saw . . . I didn’t even bother to look  what the words were. I bellowed ‘\u003ci\u003eAupre`s de ma blonde, qu’il fait bon, fait bon,\u003c\/i\u003e’  and let it go at that . . . In the Toreador Song, on the long ‘Ah’ that leads into  the chorus, I broke out the cape and made a couple of passes at the bull. Not too  much, you understand. A prop can kill a number. But enough that I got that swirl  of crimson and yellow into it. It stopped the show, and he let me repeat the second  verse.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo less sensationally, Cain sketched his own decision to become a writer  as an American Pauline conversion. Sitting on a bench across from the White House,  no less, in Lafayette Park in September 1914, depressed over the ruins of his musical  career, he claimed he heard his voice say, ‘You’re going to be a writer!’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCain would  not publish his first short story — ‘Pastorale’ — until 1929, and a novel until 1934.  Hoopes’s otherwise shrewd biography tends to chart the interval as a sequence of  edifying stages along life’s way toward an inevitable destination: take a left at  Teaching English, then a right at Newspaper Journalism, don’t forget to stop for  H. L. Mencken, and once you pass the Satirical Dialogues just before Screenplay Flats,  you’ll know you’re almost at Fiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome of these sites are worth dwelling on,  even if Cain’sprogress to \u003ci\u003ePostman \u003c\/i\u003emight have transpired or expired in any multitude  of other routes. As he worked over and sent out short stories, now lost, he returned  home to Chestertown, taught English and mathematics at the preparatory school of  Washington College, and lived in a dormitory. For his English classes, Cain stressed  the imaginative release of grammar, syntax, and punctuation — the only elements of  writing that, apparently, he believed could be taught. ‘When you learn how to punctuate,  you’ll be free to be yourselves’ — Cain recounted his instruction of his students  to David Madden. ‘Instead of being in a straitjacket of what can be put between commas  with a period at the end, you can write as freely as you talk, and know you can set  it up so it reads.’ Particularly in his novels of the thirties and early forties,  Cain was a writer for whom elastic syntax and the shaping of resilient sentences  is an adventure. He could seize  formal rigor, precision and variousness probably  only matched in American crime fiction by the David Goodis of \u003ci\u003eDown There\u003c\/i\u003e. If, as  Julian Symons once speculated, Cain’s ‘chief limitation’ was ‘coarseness’, that vulgarity,  he insisted, was ‘not of language . . . but of feeling’. Perhaps to reinforce Symons’s  caveat about coarse feelings, Cain remembered his young students in scenes that invoke  the lust at first sight moments in \u003ci\u003eThe Postman Always Rings Twice \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eDouble Indemnity\u003c\/i\u003e.  His abandoned memoir recalls a girl from a summer algebra class he taught a few years  later in Easton, Pennsylvania:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd then in one of those classes she appeared. She  was, I would say, twelve, and her second day in class she showed up in black silk  stockings . . . The pair of legs were the most beautiful I’ve seen on a twelve-year-old,  who folded them in her seat in such a way as to let me glimpse Honolulu, as Zsa Zsa  Gabor called it — then let her eyes lock with mine.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCain stopped teaching in 1917,  except for a brief stint later at St John’s College, and for the next fourteen years  was  employed as a journalist — first as a reporter for the \u003ci\u003eBaltimore American \u003c\/i\u003e(1917),  then for the \u003ci\u003eBaltimore Sun \u003c\/i\u003e(1918 and 1920-1923). After he moved to Manhattan in 1924  he wrote editorials for Walter Lippman in the \u003ci\u003eNew York World \u003c\/i\u003e(1924-1931), and eventually  a signed column in the Metropolitan Section (1928-1931). When the \u003ci\u003eWorld \u003c\/i\u003eshut down  in 1931 he worked as managing editor of \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. Cain meanwhile entered the  Army in 1918, and as a private in the 79th Infantry\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDivision fought in the Meuse-Argonne  offensive (his 1929 story ‘The Taking of Montfaucon’ memorialized the campaign).  He also edited the Division newspaper, \u003ci\u003eThe  Lorraine Cross\u003c\/i\u003e. For his most ambitious  reporting sally Cain covered the treason trial of William Blizzard, president of  the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, for the \u003ci\u003eSun\u003c\/i\u003e. During this early Red Scare  clash, he sided with the union, despite threats from the state police, and the mine  owners lobbied the paper to have him fired. He wrote reflective stories about the  episode for the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic Monthly \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, and returned to the coalmines for  a first attempt at a novel, eventually jettisoned to the wastebasket. After meeting  Mencken, Cain started to publish in the \u003ci\u003eAmerican Mercury\u003c\/i\u003e, articles, then satiric  dialogues, and finally short fiction. He joined Mencken’s boozy Saturday Night Club,  then his Sunday Night Club, and as Cain later wrote, the infamous iconoclast ‘freed  me from the thrall of the local literarians . . . liberated me from the village pump’.  Cain despised the ‘corporate awfulness’ of his \u003ci\u003eWorld \u003c\/i\u003eeditorials, but the humorous  dialogues in vernacular dialects both rural (Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia)  and urban (New York) proved so popular that in he made a book of them, \u003ci\u003eOur Government\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFollowing the appearance of ‘Pastorale’ in the March 1928 \u003ci\u003eAmerican Mercury\u003c\/i\u003e, Cain  slipped in an occasional short story among his dialogues and articles — ‘The Taking  of Mountfaucon’ is the most persuasive and lasting. But not before he departed for  Hollywood late in 1931 to write for Paramount did he really start to produce fiction.  Cain disliked movies — ‘there was no such thing as a good one,’ he claimed. John  Howard Sharp seems to speak for Cain in his tirade against Hollywood from the self-styled  high-art angle of his singing:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI didn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t like it partly  because of the way they treated a singer . . . To them, singing is just something  you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so  is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something  that hasn’t occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake  is a producer that can’t tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn’t know  a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for  him one  night, that can’t read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made,  that can’t even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing,  literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent  him Clark Gable to play in it. I did all right, you understand . . . I kind of got  the hang of how you handle things out there to get along. But I never liked it, not  even for a second.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305296875749,"sku":"NP9780375414381","price":36.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375414381.jpg?v=1767741019","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-postman-always-rings-twice-double-indemnity-mildred-pierce-and-selected-stories-isbn-9780375414381","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}