In 1934 James M. Cain published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. The tale of illicit lovers fueled by sexual obsession and greed to murder the woman’s husband became a best seller and inspired three different movie versions before 1946. Two years later, Cain began publishing his follow-up in a serialized form in Liberty magazine. Each issue was a sellout as readers devoured Cain’s tale of illicit lovers fueled by fueled by sexual obsession and greed to murder the woman’s husband.
Needless to say, some initial criticism leapt upon the similarity of plots to accuse Cain of merely repeating the framework of the success of his first novel as grist for his second. And, indeed, money was the motivating force behind Cain’s second novel. While working with little forward career development as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the success of Postman did not translate into a steady income. While fast money may have been impetus behind following the basic outline of his first novel as the template for his second, the truth is that Double Indemnity contains elements which make it a much more subversive and revolutionary tale than the earlier one.
Much of the success of The Postman Always Rings Twice lay in its very tawdriness. It is the story of a pretty young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to the Greek owner of a rundown California diner who has starts an affair with a handsome young drifter that leads to murder, betrayal and tragedy. The lower working class milieu situates the novel as fairly standard stuff psychologically: it is not difficult to imagine these characters engaging in criminal behavior.
By contrast, Double Indemnity is about a successful and experience insurance salesman and the second wife of a respectable upper middle class husband. Neither are immediate candidates for the idea of being among the criminal element and neither is portrayed as particularly needy in terms of the insurance settlement that they conspire to kill for. Double Indemnity is one of the first American crime novels to suggest that psychopathy lives next door or works down the hall.
The legacy of Double Indemnity was forever cemented in 1944 when the film version directed by Billy Wilder essentially codified the rules for a genre which could come to be known as film noir.
