Book Review - Double Indemnity by James M. Cain

Double Indemnity

The hard-boiled detective story isn't too new of a device anymore, but in the early '40s and '50s, readers were clamoring for these crime dramas starring edgy main characters and sexy or fast-paced dialogue with a smattering of pulpy detective work thrown in. James M. Cain is perhaps one of the more influential of these writers, and you can see his influence at work even in more contemporary crime dramas (I'd say the quips of, say, CSI: Miami perhaps take an interest in the early roman noir).  

Double Indemnity is one of those stories you can't help but like right from the get-go. Cain puts us in the first-person perspective of Huff, an insurance salesman who we soon find has been turned off by the ritualism of his job. He falls into an engagement with a married woman, Phyllis, who he suspects has a card up her sleeve that involves some type of "accidental" death of her husband. That doesn't stop our protagonist, though; it partially eggs him on, as he's under a sort of mid-life crisis where he feels like he wants to buck the insurance system, show his skills of understanding his own career, and pull off the ultimate heist: the murder of Phyllis' husband, made to look like an accident of falling off of a train to receive double indemnity - hence the title.

Cain is a master at characterization here. Huff's sweet-talking is more than enough to get the reader to like him, as his narration is rife with personality-infused description in a dark noir style. But Cain also positions Huff in situations where he comes off as a good character even when he does some villainous things. For one thing, Cain implants in our minds the image that something is afoot in the background of the events; maybe Phyllis isn't who we think she is, maybe even Huff's not the gentle-spoken man he makes himself out to be (yet the prose comes off as so honest it's almost impossible to believe). Even then, some of the minor characters are developed well enough where we doubt their involvement in the deeper case but can never quite drop them from our suspect list.

In a way, Double Indemnity plays out like the board game Clue - the book and the game seem simple enough at first, but quickly become much more complex in the later stages. This is a good thing; for Double Indemnity to remain about one murder would lead to a loss of interest with the reader - it becomes less a mystery than a complex ruse to kill a man. But Cain quickly excites the reader with an investigation where even our protagonist doesn't know exactly what's going on. Not to mention that even though part of the twist comes as little surprise, the story's finale does, and works as a psychological investigation of guilt from a man who felt wholly ready to kill in cold blood.

Through the slew of mystery releases, Double Indemnity holds its own, providing a grit and twist that grabs the reader early on and never lets go. The shortness of the book is actually a boon to the book, too, because it enables the slow reader, or the one with a short attention span, ample room to quickly read the story without filler. This was, in all seriousness, a delightful read.

Look for a review of the film sometime next week. These types of reviews, where book and film are reviewed, will be a pattern throughout the half-year, as I'm taking a Film Adaptations course this semester which, oddly enough, has selected books that correspond well with the subject matter of this blog.