William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
James M. Cain's
Double Indemnity (1941)
Updated 12/04/09
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Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), by James M. Cain
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Double Indemnity (1940) by James M. Cain
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
Mildred Pierce (1941) by James M. Cain
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Cain wrote an eight-part serial, "Double Indemnity," for Liberty magazine in 1936. Part reworking of Postman, part recollection of his youth selling insurance, Double Indemnity portrayed a corporate/legal control of life that amounted to "double jeopardy" and appealed to Depression readers' sense of helplessness. (Hoopes 1982: 248).
This time Cain stayed even closer to the Snyder-Gray trial, making his protagonist an insurance salesman. Walter Huff meets Phyllis Nirdlinger just as Ruth Snyder met her beaux, when he comes to her door selling insurance. She asks questions that make him suspicious, but her intentions complement his desire to dupe his employers, and he joins her in a plot to murder her husband. Huff explains his plan to collect on the double indemnity feature offered in case of death on a railroad journey. But after the two commit the perfect murder, a faked suicide, they are estranged, because Huff’s employers – led by Keyes, the claims chief – shadow Phyllis’ every move. Like Frank Chambers, who pursued Madge, Huff moves on to a new lust object – Phyllis’ stepdaughter Lola. But Lola reveals makes known Phyllis’ complicity in a series of grisly murders and that Phyllisalso reveals that she is secretly dating Lola’s former boyfriend Nino Sachetti. Since Huff is the only father-figure left in the narrative, he grows appropriately paranoid: have Phyllis and Nino duped him into committing murder on their behalf? Will Nino, the new prodigal son, kill him? Has he been a sap? He plots to murder Phyllis, but she ambushes him first. Waking in a hospital with police about to blame Lola, Huff confesses. After some ends are wrapped up with Keyes in boy-to-boy fashion, he then commits suicide with Phyllis.
For Double Indemnity Cain scaled back his religious motifs, but the central features of confession remain. Huff begins on the word I and addresses the reader directly a dozen times in the first forty pages. His references to “this House of Death, that you’vere been reading about in the papers” establish a degree of anteriority, and his asides – “Getting in is the tough part of my job, and you don’t tip what you came for till you get where it counts” – give his account the retrospection and moral weight of confession (Cain 1936: 29). The final pages reveal it to be just that – a notarized testament he has traded for temporary freedom.
As in Postman, lust is the sin by which other sins gain admission: sexual desire persuades him Huff to stay and draw out Phyllis’ proposition of murder. But Huff’s his desires constantly change: he wants Phyllis, he wants to outwit the system, to have Lola, to save himself, and then to kill Phyllis. This continually renewed consumptive capacity seems to be what made Huff an appealing film noirfilm noir hero: he’s an existential rebel in a consumer economy. But his lust is actually less important than his desire to outwit the statistical system of the insurance industry: “I’m going to put it through, straight down the line,” he says, “and there won’t be any slips” (Cain 1936: 23).
I’m a croupier in that game. I know all their tricks, I lie awake nights thinking up tricks, so I’ll be ready for them when they come at me. And then one night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bet. (Cain 1936: 29)
Huff be is the first high-tech, white-collar criminal in American literature.
But the emerging post-Depression economy needed to limit his kind of aggressive rationality rather than to have insiders use what usually did not happen against it. That Huff works in one of the Depression’s growth industries may have offended intellectuals, for reviewers of 1936 treated him as reviewers might treat a Wall St. arbitrager of 2008. But popular audiences seem to have sympathized with him more, and a glance at the issues of Liberty magazine in which the novel was serialized shows how widespread was the reach of the system that Huff problematizes. Each article in Liberty has a suggested reading time, statistics pepper the pages, and the ads celebrate the mechanical icons of the novel – cars, trains, and ships. To be certain, Cain still used religious imagery. Huff’s early confession that he stands fascinated at the edge of a precipice “looking over the edge” (18) recalls Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards’ use of the image 195 years earlier in his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."
Later when Huff returns home so rattled he cannot think, he recites the Lord’s Prayer. On discovering his fear of Phyllis, he says, “I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed” (79). But these his prayers have a wooden quality: religion doesn’t have much role in the life of a protagonist who chooses to commit suicide, actual or economic.
The movie of Double Indemnity (1944) became one of the masterpieces of film noir, but Cain had little to do with it. As a conjunction of eccentric talents, however, it is probably unrivalled: James M. Cain's novel as co-scripted Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (who said that Cain was "every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk") (McShane 1981: 23)
References and Further Reading
Cain, James M. (1934) The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1936) Double Indemnity. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1937) Serenade. New York: Knopf.
____________. (1940) The Embezzler. New York: Liberty magazine.
____________. (1941) Mildred Pierce. New York: Knopf.
Hoopes, Roy. (1982) Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain . New York: Holt.
New York Times, May 3 – 10, 1927.
Madden, David. (1970) James M. Cain. Boston: Twayne.
____________. (1977) Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP.
Marling, William. (1986) Raymond Chandler. Boston: Twayne.
______________. ( (1995). The American Roman Noir. Athens: U George P.
McShane, Frank, ed. (1981) Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler New York: Columbia UP.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Man Under Sentence of Death,” in Madden, Tough Guy Writers (111-12).
Sikov, Ed. (1999) On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder. London: Hyperion.
26
has alwaysty services" in 1812, and shortly he established his own department, the Surete, which became the French equivalent of the American F.B.I. In a typical year, William Ruehlmann reports, "Vidocq had twelve men working for him, and between them they made 811 arrests, including 15 assassins, 341 thieves and 38 receivers of stolen property." 1 When Vidocq's Memoirs were published in France in 1828, they were immediately popular and translated into English. Honore de Balzac modelled the character of Vautrid out the basics of the detective story, which underlie much hard-boiled fiction. In "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe introduced his brilliant, eccentric detective, C. Auguste Dupin, whose solutions were chronicled by an admiring, amiable narrator. Later detectives, notably Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, became even more eccentric, and Poe's nameless narrator had his counterpart in the amiable Dr. Watson. In "Rue Morgue," Poe introduced three common motifs of detective fiction: the wrongly suspected man, the crime in the locked room, and the solution by unexpected means. Dupin solved the crime by reading the evidence better than the police did and by noticing clues that they had neglected, thus highlighting the importance of inference and observation.
In a second story, "The Purloined Letter," Poe invented the plot of the stolen document, the recovery of which ensures the safety of some important person. Dupin solved this crime by two more important formulae: deduction through psychological insight into the protagonists, and a search for evidence in the most obvious place. In the third Dupin story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget," Poe introduced and developed the crime by recounting newspaper clippings, a technique that later attracted the literary realists and is still used. Though this mystery contained no solution (it was in court at the time), leaving the reader to deduce a solution, it marked the beginning of the genre's use of and competition with newspapers in presenting the "truth about crime" to readers.
Of the other two Poe stories, "Thou Art the Man" presents three important motifs: 1) the criminal confesses when faced with the enormity of his crime, 2) the detective follows a trail of false clues, and 3) he deduces that the criminal is the least likely suspect. In "The Gold Bug," which many think Poe's finest mystery, a man finds an encrypted map that promises the discovery of hidden treasure. All five stories are dark in tone, with characters whose motives are unknowable, as well as the unexpected endings common to the gothic novel in Poe's time.
Poe was also a literary critic, and he created a rationale for the detective story. "The unity of effect of impression is a point of the greatest importance," wrote Poe: "this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed in one sitting." 2 Unity of tone and a length that permitted readings in a single sitting led Poe to conclude that detection was essentially a "tale, a species of composition which admits of the highest development of artistical power in alliance with the widest vigour of imagination." Poe suggested three corollaries: 1) Failure to preserve the mystery "until the proper moment of denouement, throws all into confusion, so far as regards the effect intended." 2) Everything should converge on the denouement: "There should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design." 3) It is imperative that "no undue or inartistic means be employed to conceal the secret of the plot." 3 Later writers explored the limits of these rules, but initially they focussed the genre.
By 1870, detective fiction was finding a popular American audience. Allan Pinkerton published The Expressman And The Detective
In England, by contrast, the detective genre underwent a more analytic, stylized development, exemplified in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. His A Study in Scarlet 
American detective fiction, with its common man hero, was also influenced by the dime novel, which often drew on frontier settings and heroics that owed to the Leather-Stocking Tales of James Fennimore Cooper in the early 1800s. Beginning in 1860, the yellow-colored, paper-backed books of the firm Beadle and Adams promised readers "dollar books for a dime." 6 These "yellowbacks" fit in the pockets of Civil War soldiers and were printed on the cheapest newsprint, made from pure wood pulp without rag fiber, hence their nickname of "pulps." Beadle and Adams had a standing order for 60,000 copies of each new book, and sometimes ordered a second printing within a week. Some of the yellowbacks went through ten or twelve printings, a phenomenal circulation for the day. President Lincoln, his vice-president and secretary of state, many senators, and even the celebrated clergyman Henry Ward Beecher have been named as readers of the Beadle and Adams novels. 7
The setting of the dime novel might be the West, the sea, the Maine woods or war, but in all of them a young, usually male protagonist is immersed in a foreign environment to which he must adapt quickly or perish. Dime novels imparted a great deal of practical lore about fishing or trapping or seacraft or "hunting Injuns," along with the notion that the protagonist had a "right" to this setting or could domesticate it. The dime novel hero exhibits courage, honesty, and chivalry, not to mention a sense of Manifest Destiny. There is usually a female romantic interest, treated chastely. The endings were morally uplifting if not happy.
As early as 1874, authorities blamed dime novels for juvenile delinquency and crime, a debate that continues still. In the Boston trial of Jesse Pomeroy, prosecutors suggested that this sadistic murderer was motivated by "literature of the dime novel type." Boston prosecutors used the same tactic against a man named Piper. In 1884, the New York Tribune charged that three boys had robbed their parents and "started off for the boundless West" because of dime novels. 8 The relation between crime and narrative about it has long been debated.
In the late 1880s, the American dime novel began to branch. Some were distinctly Western, evolving from the "Injun tales" of Seth Jones, a descendant of Cooper's heroes. A new Western hero, Deadwood Dick, appeared in 1884 and became the most popular hero of dime novels. His creator, Edward L. Wheeler, eventually published eighty separate books on his adventures and those of Dick, Junior. 9 But an interest in the adventures of city life was also taking hold. Its heroes were the first urban, pulp detectives. The first Old Cap Collier story, Elm City Tragedy (1881), was based, like Poe's "Marie Roget," on an actual murder case in New Haven, Connecticut. 10 Old Cap Collier novels were written by various authors and eventually numbered over 700 titles. 11 So valuable was Old Cap that when he retired, he came back as the author of a second generation of novels. These novels were visually distinct: six by ten inch pamphlets, without illustration, in green covers. Inside were eighty pages of mayhem, according to Pearson, who has chronicled in a single book no less than five one-on-one fights, seven fights with gangs, twelve attacks with knives or clubs, one bombing, one poisoning, and one attack by a steel trap disguised as a chair. In this same story Old Cap beat two men "to a jelly," hurled twenty-one men through the air, and choked one man until black in the face. 12
Old Cap had competitors, Broadway Billy and Jack Harkaway, but chiefly Old Sleuth. First appearing in 1872, Old Sleuth specialized in disguises and spoke in underworld slang. 13 The idea of an "underworld" owes not only to classic mythology, but to the difficulty Victorians had in conceptualizing the cityscape. Without tall buildings or good maps, they had no overview of proliferating streets and alleys, which often lacked numbers and even names. Popular publications explained the confusion to them by illustrations that used the "bird's eye view" or the "mole's eye view." Old Cap and Old Sleuth used the latter to explain the city's "underground" systems to fearful new urban residents.
The western/urban split intensified around 1890, the year picked by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner to mark the closing of the American West. The date has seemed notable to many scholars. Henry Nash Smith wrote that the hero of the dime cowboy novel then became "a self-reliant, two-gun man who behaved in almost exactly the same fashion whether he were outlaw or peace officer. Eventually he was transformed into a detective and creased in any significant sense to be Western" 14 Later, scholar Leslie Fiedler returned to this similarity, calling the detective "a cowboy adapted to life on the city streets, the embodiment of innocence moving untouched through universal guilt." 15
As the dime novel turned the century, interest in the urban detective continued, but in a cleaned-up hero named Nick Carter. The Nick Carter Weekly anthologized his adventures, which were written by Eugene Sawyer and several other authors. Published by Street and Smith, the Nick Carter stories moved a step closer to hard-boiled fiction. For more urbane readers, however, there was an even cleaner lad, Frank Merriwell
This split accentuated in the 1910-20 period, when the demand for easily read, popular fiction became immense. Over 20,000 magazines were in print by 1922. Leading the respectable pack were "slick paper" magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Smart Set, Scribner's and Liberty. Slick magazines were printed on paper with a high fiber-rag and clay content, making them smooth to the hand, long-lasting, and brilliantly white. They featured generous illustrations, often in color, advertisements for hard goods, and they connoted higher social status. They printed fiction by leading authors of the Merriwell school (F. Scott Fitzgerald was their star) and they paid astonishingly well, up to a dollar a word. Their detectives were brilliant, witty, and eccentric; the crimes and methods of their solution tended towards Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The most celebrated of the slick magazine detectives was Philo Vance, the creation of Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote under the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine. The wealthy Wright, who was the first editor of Smart Set, a trend-setting arbiter of Eastern style, set the tone in 1926 with the first of his twelve Vance novels, The Benson Murder Case
At the other end of the spectrum were new incarnations of Old Cap, Old Sleuth, and Nick Carter. Their creators toiled for a penny a word and still published on disreputable pulp. These writers submitted to Nick Carter Weekly, Detective Stories, Girls' Detective, Doctor Death, Brief Stories, Argosy All-Story or the more lurid Police Gazette, most of which offered readers 150 pages of fiction for ten or fifteen cents. The early leader was Detective Stories, owned by Smith and Street, which had published The Nick Carter Weekly. 17 Between 1920 and 1950, the prime of hard-boiled fiction, 175 different detective magazines graced the newsracks. Some of the pulp writers, using a dozen names, wrote 1.5 million words a year. "A million words a year is so usual," wrote Frank Gruber, who credited this outpouring to the invention of the typewriter. He noted that earlier pulp novelists had written seventy thousand words a week in longhand. 18
The first significant hard-boiled authors appeared around 1923 and at the same magazine, The Black Mask. See the section about Black Mask for more information.
Notes
1 William Ruehlmann, Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye