‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’: Lust, Murder and Fate

A review of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’, by James M. Cain; Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.

The Postman Always Rings Twice opens with the brilliant opening line ‘They threw me off the hay truck about noon’, which gets across a vast amount of information while setting the tone for a lean, mean, pacy thriller that takes you by the throat and doesn’t let go. The narrator is Frank Chambers, a drifter who comes upon a roadside sandwich joint called the Twin Oaks Tavern after spending three weeks in Tia Juana. He talks his way into a free breakfast and is just about to head off again when he spots the owner’s wife. She ‘wasn’t any raving beauty … but her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.’

She is Cora, sultry wife of Nick Papadakis, a hardworking Greek immigrant. Nick is easy to charm and quick to offer Frank a job. Frank takes the job so he can be close to Cora, to whom he feels an instant attraction: ‘From the filling station I could just get a good look at the kitchen.’ She lets on that she resents Nick and feels trapped in the marriage. After suggesting Nick go into town to have a new sign for the tavern made, Frank locks the door of the restaurant and goes to Cora. She yields. Their nascent fling has violent overtones:

‘I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers …

“Bite me! Bite me!”

I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck while I carried her upstairs.’

Soon the affair grows into a plan to murder Nick. But no crime goes unpunished, and betrayal, mistrust and the weight of sin starts to pull the pair into a spiral of paranoia and despair.

Nick is easy to charm and quick to offer Frank a job.

The beauty of The Postman Always Rings Twice, aside from its thrilling prose and electrifying pace, is that its central characters are not villains in the typical sense. Rather they are ordinary people, if criminal in the case of Frank, whose longing for escape and the thrill of forbidden love moves them to murder a good man. Cain does not romanticise their deeds. He does not philosophise or moralise. He just tells the story. Frank and Cora, driven by raw, animal desire, commit a crime; and as Dante’s shows us, all crime is its own punishment. The characters disrupt the order of things, and the universe demands the books be balanced.

But the story also explores the American Dream. Nick, an immigrant, works hard, trusts strangers and is ceaselessly upbeat and hopeful. He stands for an ideal that neither Frank nor Cora share or respect. Yet their own bids for freedom make them less free than they were before. They are ensnared not just by their wild feelings for each other, but by extreme emotional discomfort. They seek out freedom and end up with none.

Nick, an immigrant, works hard, trusts strangers and is ceaselessly upbeat and hopeful.

The prose is thrilling: stripped to its essence, each clause charged with a maximum of meaning. There is no sentimentality, no reflection, no redemption. It is as stark as polished bone. The effect of rendering violence so matter-of-factly is unsettling. At the same time, the absence of detailed characterisation raises the characters to the level of archetypes, the drifter and the thwarted femme fatale, playing out a lasting human story of lust, violence, and guilt. As in Greek tragedy, the story derives its power not from the way events unfold but from the sense of inevitability as they do. The postman, after all, ‘always rings twice’.

We are left with a deeply moral story. The Postman Always Rings Twice may be brutal and unsentimental, depicting acts and outcomes shorn of commentary or gloss. But that is why it works. Fate hangs over the story like a storm cloud. One thing leads inexorably to the next. We should not act well because we ought to, but because if we do not, we will be the ones who suffer.