#98: The Postman Always Rings Twice

It was one of those nights when the rain steams from the city streets like sweat from the body of a nude blonde.  A blonde called "trouble."  And it was my luck to be in bed with it.

It was...a "noir" night.


The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934, is a roman noir, or "black book".  These are characterized by their gritty, hardboiled characters and the sexy sex and violence of the stories.  This was pretty hot and racy stuff for the time.  In fact, Cain's novel was banned in Boston for  the "graphic" portrayals of sex and violence.

It's no American Psycho to today's reader (seriously, don't read that), but it does have just enough sex, intrigue, and clipped, hardboiled dialogue to keep you speeding along until the very end.  The Postman Always Rings Twice is the story of a streetwise drifter who comes upon a by-the-highway tavern run by a naive Greek man and his voluptuous wife.  You see where this is going, right?  The poor bastard never had a chance.  Our drifter, Frank, takes up work at the tavern, and he and the wife, Cora, begin a torrid affair behind her husband's back.  They have explosive, world-crumbling sex at every turn, but soon they realize that with no money and no prospects there is no hope for them.  That is, unless Nick was out of the picture...

Man, murder was so much easier back in the good old days, wasn't it?  Then DNA analysis came along and fouled things up for everyone.

It takes a few tries.  Honestly, they were one step away from the old banana peel at the top of the stairs, crocodile pit at the bottom of the stairs (while your wife does it loudly with the sexy handyman on the kitchen table).  A large box propped up by a stick with a rabid wolverine under it, perhaps ("What's-a this-a! What a cute-a dog-a!").  What I'm trying to say is that Nick really doesn't see this coming, bless him. He is written as a stereotypical foolish immigrant, which is possibly meant to make it less sad when he croaks.

The two lovers are successful, ultimately, and pull off a convincing murder/accident that leaves them both convincingly injured and the Greek, dead.  After an extremely close shave at their trial, they are, amazingly, set free and begin a life together.

Frank and Cora's relationship begins to spiral, which leads to a twist ending--like the return to reality after the afterglow, their love affair simply cannot burn so hot for so long.  I loved this story and the style and period of writing that it captured, the mid-1930's.  (An aside:  it's interesting to consider The Grapes of Wrath (incidentally a well-deserved #10 on the greatest novels list) as being set in the very same time period AND general area of The Postman...)  In my opinion, this is what earns it a place on the 100 greatest novels list.  The Postman Always Rings Twice is like a comedy film winning Best Picture at the Oscars.  It's difficult for such a sensational, noir work to capture a slice of Americana, history, and period pop-culture in the framework of the gritty noir style, but The Postman... pulls it off.

...Fun fact:  if you're hoping to see a postman at any point in the novel, don't hold your breath:  nary a one appears.  Cain is recorded as saying that the title refers to his own anxiety over the arrival of the postman, who could be carrying news from a potential employer for one of his scripts--he would even sit in the yard of his home to avoid having to hear the postman ring.  But, because the postman always rang twice, he would likely hear it on the second ring, anyway.  Literary analysts speculate that the title refers to God as the "postman" and the two rings as Frank & Cora's two brushes with fate--the second "ring" reached them, although the first did not.  Very cool analogy.

Next, it's The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles.  Unlike all of the books I have written about so far, I have not yet read this one as of this writing.  From what I've seen it promises to be full of ennui and existential pondering!