With the impact of the film The Hustler, Brunswick sensed a windfall and shortened their tables (making play easier), brightened them (pastel baize) and put them in suburban bowling alleys. Consider champion Willie Mosconi's exhibition run of 526 balls in 1954, and compare it to what? Longer pot shots and a more frequent use of snookering? Both pool and snooker require these skills, though with different emphasis. They were apples, oranges and melons – all fruit all different. It was on Brunswick Monarch 5ft x 10ft tables at the midtown Bensinger's, which also featured the still larger billiard tables, and a seemingly giant snooker table. Gone are the days when, in 1962, I started shooting pool in Chicago. Snooker tables are much bigger than pool tables, so are snooker players much more skilful than pool players? Cain explores some of these same themes in his later works, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, but The Postman Always Rings Twice stands out as the seminal work for the genre.In the 1946 film version Frank (John Garfield) has a lengthy and slightly clunky closing speech explaining the meaning of the title to his captors. This short novel packs an epic’s worth of emotion and damage into its carefully chosen stream of words. It became a popular, but likely overused, story type.
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The film also spawned a series of ‘Cain template’ films that featured adultery, spousal homicide and characters who committed crimes, but were not themselves criminals. Lost is the desperation that explains her actions without justifying them. Cora for example, is more of a manipulator for its own purpose than in the book. The film captures the greed, lust and penchant for violence that fill the book, but there were changes that were more to do with the film industry, which Cain disliked, than the book. The novel also spawned a few films, notably the 1946 adaptation that stands out as an early example of film noir, in both good ways and bad. He was a champion of featuring the perpetrator of the crime, rather than law enforcement. In a way, most crime novels other than procedurals and private detective stories owe a nod to Cain.
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Dennis Lehane has been quoted about the impact Cain’s dialog – full of vernacular and true to character – had on him. Albert Camus remarked that the themes and style of Postman were an influence on The Stranger. Postman’s influence ranges across genre and time. It is the perfect cap to a tale of people following the most indecent of human desires. The ending provides a measure of both just and unjust retribution on the narrator of the story. Neat endings are not the playground for the types of characters he creates. Of course, one of Cain’s other themes, and the characteristic that places his work firmly in noir, is the hopelessness. Some fancy legal manoeuvring keeps Cora out of jail and allows reconciliation with Frank.
However, that neat and just ending is not what Cain has in store.
Under suspicion for what they’ve done, Cora is willing to betray the man she plotted with. Not the elegant murder of a hit, but the messy and inefficient work of a man with no talent for the task, but a determination to finish.Īnxiety and fear lead to betrayal. Like other works from Cain, the story follows the characters’ path to self-destruction, motivated by base desires. Cora, sick of her life and desperate for something better, convinces Frank that getting rid of her husband is the only route to freedom and a better life. Their affair, full of lust and overtones of violence, leads Frank and Cora down a dangerous path. The book tells the story of a Frank, a drifter who takes a job at a diner and falls for the greasy owner’s seductive wife, Cora.
Despite its age, The Postman Always Rings Twice still holds up and is something that any fan of this edgier type of crime fiction should read. It’s one of the earliest examples of noir and a book that was both successful and notorious when it was published in 1934. This classic novel by James Cain is full of flawed people, violence, lurid sex, bad choices and doomed people.
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