Cain is known as a novelist of the "hard-boiled" school, but the designation strikes me as covering too many other diverse writers and not saying anything about Cain's essential quality. Double Indemnity was published last year along with two other Cain stories in a volume called Three of a Kind. To that volume Cain has contributed a revealing preface on how he came to write the sort of fiction he does, and what sort he thinks it is [see excerpt above]. It makes some sense, as a writer's self-scrutiny often does. But Cain is too apologetic to see himself and his America whole.

Whatever the characters and plots of Cain's novels, there is always pretty much the same theme running through them. It is the theme of love and death coiled up with each other like fatal serpents. It is love-in-death and death-and-rebirth-in-love. Cain's idea as a writing...