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Summary: One little problem...
Review: Great book with one little problem: You have to take it on faith that our hero, Walter Neff, would actually help a woman he just met kill her husband, because there's no way to establish a plausible motivation for that in a book that runs just over 100 pages. And keep in mind that Neff is not a hit man, he's an insurance salesman for God's sake. Of course, the woman, psychotic housewife Phyllis Nirdlinger, looks nice and shapely in her sailor suit, but really...I mean in reviewing my life, I can see where almost everything I've ever done was in the hopes of being loved in some sense or another. But I've never KILLED a guy! Or even considered it very seriously. Now having said all this, I must tell you to ignore it. Get the book, go with the flow, and you'll enjoy a tight little thriller.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Walter Huff
Review: He's in love with a Black Widow, and she's in love with Death. Cain must have spent quite a lot of time exploring the Dark Side to write something as chilling as this. This is an eerie book; it's horror fiction disguised as a crime novel.
Rating: 
Summary: A Must Read
Review: I don't usually read or like hard boiled detective mysteries, but this book is really good. I liked the period in which the story takes place. I liked the insurance investigation. After reading this book I had to see the movie on video. It was also very good, but much darker than the book. I will deinitely look for and read more books by this author.
Rating:
Summary: as many thumbs up as possible
Review: i liked this one even better than the postman always rings twice. it's definitely creepier, is a great story, and still manages to be an incredibly short book. go read it!
Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Review: I love most of James M. Cain's work like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce. My favorite piece of work, though, is Double Indemnity. It's tough, real and it was based on an actual incident. The dialog is cynical, which is as it should be. The chraracters have no lllusions about one another. They have no illusions about life, either.
The lenght is just right for one of Cain's novels. I read it for the fourth time in a couple of hours and I will read it again. This is the perfect book for a rainy night. It's to be enjoyed with a glass of something strong, but not too strong. The story is already that.
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Summary: The Sex Crazed Lunitic Inside of Us All
Review: I thought this book was excellent and I am very picky. The way that James Cain made Walter Huff's character was awesome. I think it was realistic in the sense that people, especially today, think up schemes like that. I loved the way he made him observe the women in the way that he did...so flirty and raw. I definitely would recommend this book and look forward to reading other books by him.
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Summary: Historically Correct - Based on 1920's murder
Review: In many of the reviews for Double Indemnity, you will find it called a novel or a fiction piece. In reality, James Cain wrote Double Indemnity about the 1920's murder case of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, who together killed Snyder's wealthy husband. Billy Wilder made it into a film and a broadway play. Richard Schiekel also wrote a mystery based on the story. Snyder's trip to the electric chair was one of the most famous executions of the century, because a photographer strapped a camera to his ankle and photographed Ruth Snyder in the chair as the current surged through her body. It then was published on the front of The New York Daily News and became a most famous photo of the decade.
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Summary: The Postman Sometimes Rings Three Times
Review: In many ways, DOUBLE INDEMNITY is POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE redux -- the main exception being that POSTMAN's greasy spoon is replaced by a cozy upper middle class Spanish suburban house. In both books, a man is inspired by a sexy, discontented married woman into murdering hubby for gain. POSTMAN's drifter is now a cocky insurance salesman (Walter Huff) who thinks he can both beat the odds and get the girl (Phyllis Nirdlinger), and -- why not? -- her daughter Lola as well. If you know anything about Greek tragedy, you can bet that the hubris mechanism is ready to spring into action with jaws agape. James M Cain writes a tight novella that can easily be consumed in a single sitting. It's just that you feel you've been watching cockroaches mate from a great height. Few of Cain's novels show the least sign of sentiment, let alone liking, towards their characters. Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder's script for the film is actually far superior because the character of Keyes is developed into a moral center around which the story unrolls. (It also helps that Cain's INDEMNITY has a really gonzo ending.) Nonetheless, Cain is what he is -- and his stories are always worth reading. But do see the Billy Wilder movie version!
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Summary: One of Cain's Best
Review: James Cain is not a mystery writer. There are no mysteries in his books, we know who did everything almost from the beginning. However, as a thriller writer he is unsurpassed. The action in his stories moves at breakneck pace, which is one reason, incidentally, why they are so short. I can't think of any other writer who exploited story length to the level that he did. Cain's characters live in a world where a maleficent fate sooner or later overtakes them. There are no heroes; there are only ugly people. The protagonists in his stories are all ugly; the really unsettling thing is that you can usually find something of yourself in them. Walter Huff (he's renamed Walter Neff in the movie, for some reason) is an insurance agent who teams up with a woman to knock off her husband and collect on his accident policy. He's not a sympathetic character. We watch Huff go into a long slide, and become a pawn in the hands of people that he doesn't even know before the end - maleficent fate. The movie, while very good, does not tell quite the same story as the book. Although Cain wrote the novel, the screenplay was written by Raymond Chandler, with an additional credit to Billy Wilder, who directed the movie. Chandler managed to turn Walter into a sort of Philip Marlowe gone wrong, right down to the snappy internal dialogue that was Chandler's trademark. Chandler also added an element of morality into the tale that it didn't have in the book. And why does Walter kill Phyllis in the movie? I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that this doesn't happen in the book. If you're hooked on hardboiled fiction you should read this book. And although a lot of years have passed, maybe you'll appreciate why Cain was considered such a racy writer in his day, too.
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Summary: Murder will out every time
Review: James M. Cain's reputation as a master of the noir genre rests largely on his phenomenally grim 1934 story "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and this short tale, the 1935 classic "Double Indemnity." No other noir writer's reputation-whether Raymond Chandler, Dashell Hammett, or Cornell Woolrich-rests on only two stories. Well, you could throw in "Mildred Pierce" as another Cain classic, but that still leaves only three bleak yarns worth mentioning. How is it possible to sustain a literary legacy based on two, maybe three, stories that you could read in three single sittings? Think movies. You can thank Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler for Cain's enduring legacy. These two guys collaborated on the script for "Double Indemnity" the film, a film that has since become one of the classics of American cinema. And don't forget Joan Crawford won an Oscar for her work in the screen version of "Mildred Pierce." Too, if memory serves correctly, there are two film versions of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," one of them starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. If I were a writer, I wouldn't be too enthusiastic that my legacy rested on film versions of my stories. From what I've read of the noir masters, Cain isn't nearly as good of a storyteller as Chandler, Hammett, or Woolrich. He isn't as good as Jim Thompson or David Goodis either, for that matter. "Double Indemnity" tells the disastrous story of one Walter Huff. An insurance salesman working a route in California in the 1930s, Huff spends his days trying to get clients to increase their insurance holdings. His life changes for the worse when he calls on a household where he falls under the poisonous charms of Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a wealthy oil executive. When this woman inquires about procuring an accident policy for her husband in case he "happens to have an accident" while inspecting oil wells, Huff knows something is up. In his business, no one approaches an agent about buying accident insurance unless there's a nefarious murder plot in the works. At first repelled by Phyllis's roundabout suggestions to dispatch her husband, he soon falls in line with the plot by insuring her husband with a double indemnity accident policy that will pay tens of thousands of dollars in case the poor chap expires in a railway mishap. What follows is noir carried to the nth degree, as both Huff and his new girlfriend hatch the plot in minute detail. The insurance agent plans his alibi with the sort of meticulous attention one would associate with a master criminal. He coaches Phyllis on the finer points of speaking to the police, dealing with inquests, and interacting with the insurance agency. She'll need all the help she can get because Huff knows that the head of the claims department, Keyes, is one tough bulldog when it comes to investigating scams. The actual crime, which involves Huff playing a central role in the murder, is a foul play masterpiece. No one should ever take a fall in this expertly carried out misdeed, but in James Cain's world murder will out every time. In no time at all, Keyes and the president of the insurance company balk at paying out a huge claim. After bandying around the idea that Nirdlinger took his own life, Keyes arrives at a suspicion of foul play. This conclusion sets in motion a whole host of maneuvers requiring Huff to take greater and greater measures to keep the whole thing under wraps. Complicating things are Lola, Phyllis's stepdaughter, and her boyfriend Nino Sachetti. Up until the explosive revelations preceding the conclusion, Huff still looks like he will get away with the wicked deed. The crime is brilliant with one huge exception: Walter Huff, insurance agent and murderer, forgot to investigate Phyllis Nirdlinger's background. If he had, Huff probably would never have jumped into this mess with both feet. Oops. "Double Indemnity" the book isn't nearly as good as "The Postman Always Rings Twice." I had several problems with the story, the biggest being Keyes's quick analysis of what really happened to Phyllis's husband. No one, neither the police nor an insurance claims investigator, could figure this crime out with the ease that Keyes does. Another difficulty with the story is the conclusion. Once everything shakes out, I simply didn't buy what happened to Phyllis and Huff. Too, it just isn't a satisfying conclusion for a noir story. I also had a problem with Walter's sudden change of heart after he removed Nirdlinger from the scene. Here's a guy who is cool and collected, a guy who delivers a lengthy speech about how to commit a coldhearted murder without getting caught and why he is willing to rip-off the insurance company, and then he turns into a nervous nelly after the crime. It is conceivable that this could happen, but it didn't work here. Despite these problems, noir fans will want to spend a few hours with "Double Indemnity." The book is exceedingly short, the story moves at a lightening fast clip, and the characters are interesting. After reading the book, make sure to check out the film versions of "Double Indemnity," "Mildred Pierce," and "The Postman Always Rings Twice." Then spend even more of your time reading Chandler, Woolrich (especially Woolrich), and Hammett. As someone who has read a fair share of noir novels, I think you will like these other three authors more than you will like Cain. I shall give "Double Indemnity" four stars because most of the book works, but it's definitely a lesser entry in the noir canon.
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