Rating: 
Summary: A FAST TRACK TO HELL
Review: Shine a light into the lower regions of the human heart, and you'll find greed, lust, desperation--and murder. In greater or lesser portions, depending on the time of night. You'll find the endless rationalizations you can concoct to justify sending a man to his grave. You'll find the zenith of your imagination as you anticipate how they'll try to send you to the electric chair--but you're too smart for 'em. You've thought of every scenario that could foil you, except one: There's a guy getting pumped full of embalming fluid because you wanted a fast buck. And it's eating you alive.
Peer into the heart of Walter Huff, an insurance salesman with an impeccable work record, single, good-looking, and burning to stick it to the insurance company but good. A consummate salesman, he's sold his soul without even noticing. He's a chemical reaction . . . waiting for a catalyst to set him off.
Enter Phyllis Nirdlinger, early 30s, blonde, shapely--and married--who asks, "Do you handle accident insurance?" And the train leaves the station, picking up speed, bound for Hell with no turning back.
Swift and Spartan, this book snaps like a downed electrical wire. You will walk beside Walter Huff, every step of the way. You'll hear the rain smacking the roof of his Los Angeles bungalow, as he stares at the cozy fire, talking around the simple fact that he'll do anything for a pile of money. Your nerves will sing, then shrill, in the last moments before he reaches out to commit murder. You'll drip cold sweat as he becomes a rat clawing at any route of escape he can find--for the money doesn't matter anymore. Now he just wants to get away with it. He devolves from predator to prey.
And what he learns of the human psyche will numb you to the bone.
Rating: 
Summary: Read the book, see the movie
Review: This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour with one hand tied behind your back.Let me try that again. This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour without breaking a sweat. Okay, how's this? This is another of those James M. Cain novels that you can read in an hour even if you're the kind of person who moves your lips when you read. This is not to imply that Cain is the kind of writer who mixes his metaphors or hasn't gotten beyond primer prose. I mean, Shakespeare mixed his metaphors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Cain wrote literature then it was by accident. Come to think of it, Shakespeare was only trying to turn a shilling, please a patron or give an actor some range. I guess real literature comes about when you're just trying to make ends meet and somehow you get inspired and don't even know it. Cain didn't think much of this, calling it something like tripe and saying it would never be published as a book. He wrote it to appear as a serial in Redbook magazine, but Redbook rejected it so it appeared in Liberty magazine in 1935. It didn't make hardcover until the forties just before it was made into an excellent movie by Hollywood great Billy Wilder starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson. In fact, to be honest, the movie is better than the book, which as everyone knows, is usually not the case. He also wrote this to take advantage of the surprising success of his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), which Knopf published to critical acclaim on its way to bestsellerdom. Cain's stream-lined and hard-boiled faux Hemingway style charmed the critics and made the dime novel reader feel like he was reading Nathanael West or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald. Re-reading Cain's first person narrative today is a lot like watching a movie from the forties, mainly because the movies so often imitated him with their film noir voice-overs and desperate crimes for love or money. Indeed a number of Cain's novels have been made into movies, Double Indemnity, Postman, and Mildred Pierce, the most memorable. Here we have a painstakingly planned murder for the insurance money. It is so perfectly conceived that it would take a miracle for everything to fall into place. And yet it does, and yet something goes wrong. In the Wilder movie, insurance salesman Walter Neff (Walter Huff here) does it mostly out of an irresistible desire to put something over on the insurance business he has worked at all his adult life, while here in Cain's novel, Huff explains his motivation to Phyllis Nirdlinger, sociopathic wife of the intended victim: "Just pulling off some piker job, that don't interest me. But this, hitting it for the limit, that's what I go for. It's all I go for." He means that the "accident" has to take place on a train so that they can collect a double indemnity from a standard clause in the policy. Today's amoralist might proclaim that he did it for the rush of doing something almost nobody ever got away with. My problem with the novel is not the convenient way everything fell into place, or with how unlikely it was that Keyes might figure what he figured out, but with the stupid ending. You've got to read it to believe it, actually. Billy Wilder changed the ending in the movie to something more plausible. He, along with Raymond Chandler, who worked on the script with him, actually improved on the Cain novel in several places. As in Postman, Cain's antihero does his dirty work from the back of the car while the wife drives and the victim rides shotgun. (The contrivance needed to get him into the back seat strains credence but Wilder fixes that.) In truth, Cain was right: this novel needed a little work. He does NOT, however, repeat the sexual "celebration" beside the car after the murder in Postman, a scene that so shocked depression era readers. Indeed, here the two murderers are already beginning to sour on one another. What Cain does so well is to probe into our dark psyches and to let loose the dogs of dirty deeds done dumb so that we might experience vicariously the hell they might lead to. Notable in the novel is the character of Phyllis, an ex-nurse with the psychopathic mind of a serial killer. That part was played down in the movie. In the movie Cain's antihero is given human dimension through the mutual affection he has with Keyes. In the novel that affection is muted, but Cain humanizes him by showing the sincere, but hands off, love he has for the dead man's 19-year-old daughter. It's worth reading this to compare it to the movie and to see how two great screenwriters (Wilder and Chandler) handle material from a novel. It is also worth reading for the snapshot of pre-World War II Los Angeles afforded. Of course any true film noir fan or student of American lit ought not to miss this. I suggest however that you write your own ending.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Crime Noir Novella
Review: Walter Huff is a pretty decent and basically honest insurance salesman, until he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a successful California businessman. Phyllis isn't the most attractive woman, but she's a true seductress. Huff immediately knows that Phyllis will be trouble, but he can't resist her, and she quickly involves him in a plot to kill her husband. Things become even more complicated when Phyllis' step-daughter, Lola, enters the scene and bonds with Huff. James M. Cain is one of the indisputable greats of crime noir novels, and he also wrote the terrific "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The plot is fast-moving, and I love Cain's stattaco writing style. He also includes so much great detail, such as the "blood red curtains" in Phyllis' living room. Further, Cain makes the action very believable and doesn't overlook any plot holes, which is not always the case in this genre. I really liked this book. Having said that, I think that the movie (1944, directed by the peerless Billy Wilder) is even better than the book. I know that's blasphemous, but the movie is one of the all-time great American movies. Read the book and don't miss the movie either!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Crime Noir Novella
Review: Walter Huff is a pretty decent and basically honest insurance salesman, until he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a successful California businessman. Phyllis isn't the most attractive woman, but she's a true seductress. Huff immediately knows that Phyllis will be trouble, but he can't resist her, and she quickly involves him in a plot to kill her husband. Things become even more complicated when Phyllis' step-daughter, Lola, enters the scene and bonds with Huff. James M. Cain is one of the indisputable greats of crime noir novels, and he also wrote the terrific "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The plot is fast-moving, and I love Cain's stattaco writing style. He also includes so much great detail, such as the "blood red curtains" in Phyllis' living room. Further, Cain makes the action very believable and doesn't overlook any plot holes, which is not always the case in this genre. I really liked this book. Having said that, I think that the movie (1944, directed by the peerless Billy Wilder) is even better than the book. I know that's blasphemous, but the movie is one of the all-time great American movies. Read the book and don't miss the movie either!
|
