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 technician is that if you mix a potion of love with the powerful ingredient of murder, then you get the strongest light possible shed on the love story. It is what he calls "murder as the love-rack." And in both Double Indemnity and in his minor classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice, you get the same theme: of a man and woman, powerfully drawn to each other, who commit murder for love and money, and then "find that the earth is not big enough for two persons who share such a dreadful secret, and eventually turn on each other." Thus, more than any other contemporary writer, Cain has become the novelist-laureate of the crime of passion in America.
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