The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

I don't know if I ever read this before. I ran through a lot of the standard noir library, back in the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard days, but all those books were destroyed in my 2011 flood, and I mostly read them way back - up through the mid-90s, before I had kids.

I know I read at least one Cain book, so it was either this or Double Indemnity. What's the difference between the two? Well, this one doesn't have a postman in it, if that helps. They both have double indemnity.

The Postman Always Rings Twice was James M. Cain's first novel, published in 1934 after a substantial career in journalism and a less-successful stint at screenwriting. It's since become one of the most famous hardboiled novels, helping set the tone for an entire era of crime fiction. (I read it in a Library of America book, actually - Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s - which is a decent indication of its renown.)

It's a short book, driven by the voice of its main character, Frank Chambers, who tells it in first person. Frank is a tramp, riding the rails from town to town and living randomly. He's poor, but that life suits him - he's about as happy as he expects to be.

Then he wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern, somewhere out on the open road in Southern California. The owner/proprietor, Nick Papadakis, needs help running that lunchroom and filling station, and Frank thinks it'll be something to do for a few days or weeks, before his feet take him onward. But he falls for Nick's much younger wife, Cora - and she for him.

This is noir, and a short novel, so they quickly start an affair and, not too much later, decide that they need to kill "the Greek." A first attempt fails but puts him in the hospital. The second try is successful, mostly according to plan, but gets Frank and Cora caught up in an inquest and the perceptive local prosecutor. And things get more complicated from there.

Again, it's '30s noir, from the era when first-person criminals ended their stories as they went off to death - so expect that going in. Frank is doomed from page one; that's the whole point of a book like this. His voice is compelling and his viewpoint clear - Cora doesn't come into focus as much, but a man like that in that era wasn't entirely thinking of women as people, so it all works.

It's a very short book, as good thrillers and noir often are: set up a situation, and run it down relentlessly. It's been the template for a thousand variations since, but still strong enough to stand up to those comparisons: you might as well go back to the original.