The Postman Always Rings Twice Book

The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain is a short but intense thriller with a sharp punch to the nose dose of American crime, entwined with romance. I say a sharp punch to the nose because that really sums up how I felt after I had turned the last page; like instead of sitting and reading for a few hours I had actually been physically assaulted by Cain himself. Narrated in the first person by a drifter called Frank Chambers, the story begins with our narrator stumbling upon a roadside diner after having been thrown off the hay truck he was hitching a ride in the back of. Frank orders some food and before he knows it has struck up a conversation with Nick the Greek, the manager and proprietor. Nick is desperate for an honest and hard working odd jobs man to work in his diner and garage. All his past employees were unreliable and quit on him just as soon as he hired them, but Nick is convinced that Frank fits the bill. Being a drifter, Frank is not so sure that he wants to stick around in one place for any length of time. That is until he sees Nick's wife Cora. Frank is filled with desire for Cora and a mutual animal attraction is sparked the second the two's eyes meet. Frank takes the job and sets about taking his boss' wife too. The pair begin a violently passionate relationship and become consumed by their hunger and desire for each other, arriving at the conclusion that they must kill Cora's husband Nick, in order to be together. The rest of the book brutally documents Frank's and Cora's plans and attempts to kill Nick, the realities and consequences of the pair's actions and the price they ultimately both have to pay.

The reverse of the book offers an irresistibly enticing account of the original 1934 publication's ban in Boston for 'its explosive mix of eroticism and violence'. Before reading the book I assumed this ban probably arose out of overzealous 1930s Irish-American religious prudence and puritanism. How wrong I proved to be! I found the book to be rather shocking in several places, even by today's standards. For example, in one scene a kiss between the two lovers sees Frank bite Cora's lip so hard it spurts blood. In another a character's skull is cracked with the sickening thud of a spanner. The violence is spread evenly and sparsely throughout the book and is by no means a constant theme. However, it is probably this sparseness that makes the violence all the more affecting when it suddenly and unexpectedly explodes from the page. Whilst definitely not for the faint hearted, if you are used to watching modern crime dramas like CSI and Law and Order, the content should not be unbearably offensive or shocking.

The first two thirds of the book developed interestingly, yet rather smoothly and as expected based upon my estimation and prediction of the story arc. The last third however completely blew me away. Cain threw the rule book out the window and turned the story upside down on its head, offering thrilling and complex plot twists and breathtaking shocks and jolts. The ending left be gobsmacked as Cain unpredictably yet skilfully killed off the story in a couple of pages, producing a literary whiplash that both shocked and surprised me to my core.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is undoubtedly a love story and a crime thriller in equal measure, but it has a good element of humour also. The character development is superbly advanced for such a short story, and like an Espresso compared to an Americano, Cain concentrated all the flavour and intensity into one tiny cup where other authors use a mug. I particularly liked the character of Nick the Greek, with his singing and guitar playing and his funny sayings and phrases. It is worth remembering that the story is sexually charged as well as violent in nature and so is best suited to a mature audience. However other than this I would recommend the book to anyone interested in crime or romance. I loved it. Hope you do too.

'One of the great crime novels of all time' Tony Parsons, Express'Nobody has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler' Tom Wolfe'It is no accident that movies based on three [of Cain's novels] helped to define the genre known as film noir' NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS'The most starkly elemental thing that has been written for years' EVENING STANDARDThe 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.

'Nobody has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler' Tom Wolfe First published in 1934, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE caused a scandal with its explosive mix of violence and sex, and immediately...