In the autumn of 1934, shortly after the release of his first novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain and wife Elina Tyszecka purchased a home in the Southern California city of Beverly Hills. Anticipating work as a screenplay writer in Hollywood, Cain decided to write a serial to help pay for the expensive property.[3][4] The plot for Double Indemnity was derived from two independent sources:
1) An incident shared with him by Arthur Krock, assistant publisher when Cain worked at the New York World in 1924 intrigued him:[5] A printer at the Louisville Courier-Journal had gratuitously altered the word “TUCK” in a routine advertisement for ladies underwear to form a vulgar four-letter word. The ad was published in the next edition. When Krock confronted the guilty employee, he responded: “Mr. Krock, you do nothing your whole life but watch for something like that happening…and then you catch yourself watching for chances to do it…” Cain was fascinated with the dramatic possibilities implicit in this reckless and self-destructive act. [6][7]
2) Cain was familiar with aspects of the insurance business, having sold insurance in Washington D. C. at the age of twenty-two[8] He obtained additional insights into how fraud was committed from his father who worked for an insurance company. Cain was impressed by comments from an auto insurance salesman he had consulted when researching details for The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1933. They assured him that “the big crime mysteries in this country are locked up in insurance company files.”[9] With a story and a dramatic element in mind, Cain informed his agent Edith Haggard that he would model the style of the serial on The Postman Always Rings Twice:
It will be told almost in exactly the same style as my Postman book and, as a murder story, have the novelty that the insurance [investigator] who solves it never relies on any clues at all, in fact never even gets a clue. His weapons are the big human factors that people always overlook when they try to pull something smart…[10]
The novel was completed in late summer 1935 with the title Double Indemnity provided by Cain’s agent James Geller.[11][12] When Haggard’s effort to sell the serial to Redbook failed, and book publisher Alfred A. Knopf showed no interest, Geller took manuscripts to several Hollywood studios, generating tremendous enthusiasm. When the Hays Office examined the work for film adaption, they emphatically rejected it. Cain considered rewriting the serial, but Haggard had succeeded in selling Double Indemnity to Liberty magazine for $5000, and it was published in early 1936.[13]
