There is, of course, a way that Frank and Cora could be together – they could just skip town – but she cannot walk away from the business and the prospect of getting Nick’s money. Nick is oblivious to the affair going on behind his back but we quickly learn that Cora is looking for a way out and she sees this new relationship with Frank as her answer, planning to lean on him to help dispose of her husband.Ĭora is the archetypal femme fatale, being young, seemingly vulnerable and yet uncompromising with an apparent masochistic streak. Few debut novelists find their voice so early and so clearly.Ĭain wastes little time in establishing the premise and the relationships between Frank, Cora and Nick, creating a compelling and tense situation.

Even eighty-five years later it still possesses a striking raw quality that perfectly fits the tone of the story and helps to establish the main characters. The first thing that strikes me about this novel is just how confident and direct Cain’s writing is. Things however do not run smoothly and soon Frank and Cora find themselves under police scrutiny… The pair eventually develop a scheme by which they intend to kill Nick, making it appear to be an accident. Frank is not usually one to stick around and work a paycheck but he feels an intense attraction to the man’s much younger wife, Cora, and after deciding to stay a while, the two initiate an affair. It begins when a drifter named Frank Chambers visits a diner and is offered a job by the proprietor, Nick Papadakis. It has been adapted a number of times, including the celebrated 1946 movie adaptation, and proved hugely influential in its ideas and imagery, inspiring other works like Dard’s The Gravedigger’s Bread and Camus’ The Stranger. It is a fixture on many best novel lists including the CWA, MWA and Modern Library top hundred lists.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is an important and widely celebrated novel within the mystery and crime fiction genre. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America’s bleak underside, and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger. A problem that has only one grisly solution–a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve.įirst published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir.

A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband.

The mailman always rings twice book