Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Crime Noir Novella, July 21, 2003
Walter Huff is a pretty decent and basically honest insurance salesman, until he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of a successful California businessman. Phyllis isn't the most attractive woman, but she's a true seductress. Huff immediately knows that Phyllis will be trouble, but he can't resist her, and she quickly involves him in a plot to kill her husband. Things become even more complicated when Phyllis' step-daughter, Lola, enters the scene and bonds with Huff. James M. Cain is one of the indisputable greats of crime noir novels, and he also wrote the terrific "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The plot is fast-moving, and I love Cain's stattaco writing style. He also includes so much great detail, such as the "blood red curtains" in Phyllis' living room. Further, Cain makes the action very believable and doesn't overlook any plot holes, which is not always the case in this genre. I really liked this book. Having said that, I think that the movie (1944, directed by the peerless Billy Wilder) is even better than the book. I know that's blasphemous, but the movie is one of the all-time great American movies. Read the book and don't miss the movie either!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Double the Fun, May 4, 2006
James Cain followed up his controversial THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE with another thin crime novel DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Like POSTMAN, it brings the reader into a world of moral indifference. In other words, it's great!
The action follows insurance agent Walter Huff, who has at some point come up with an insurance scheme to off a guy and collect the insurance. He discovers his partner in crime, Phyllis Nirdlinger, when she inquires about accident insurance for her husband. But this is James Cain writing. It is not going to be that easy, is it? You bet not.
Phyllis turns out to be way, waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy more dangerous than Walter ever imagined her to be. He learns too late that he is just one more patsy in Phyllis's own plans, much bigger and nastier than the ones Walter himself formulated. Complicating the matter is Phyllis's step-daughter, Lola, whose wholesomeness actually touches some soft spot in Walter's heart.
Perhaps Cain mellowed a little bit between POSTMAN and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. The main character actually feels some degree of guilt for the crime and actually shows concern for someone besides himself. Jeez, what a softie. Do not worry, though. There is enough human darkness here to satisfy even the hardest of readers' hearts.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One of Cain's Best, December 12, 2001
James Cain is not a mystery writer. There are no mysteries in his books, we know who did everything almost from the beginning. However, as a thriller writer he is unsurpassed. The action in his stories moves at breakneck pace, which is one reason, incidentally, why they are so short. I can't think of any other writer who exploited story length to the level that he did.Cain's characters live in a world where a maleficent fate sooner or later overtakes them. There are no heroes; there are only ugly people. The protagonists in his stories are all ugly; the really unsettling thing is that you can usually find something of yourself in them. Walter Huff (he's renamed Walter Neff in the movie, for some reason) is an insurance agent who teams up with a woman to knock off her husband and collect on his accident policy. He's not a sympathetic character. We watch Huff go into a long slide, and become a pawn in the hands of people that he doesn't even know before the end - maleficent fate. The movie, while very good, does not tell quite the same story as the book. Although Cain wrote the novel, the screenplay was written by Raymond Chandler, with an additional credit to Billy Wilder, who directed the movie. Chandler managed to turn Walter into a sort of Philip Marlowe gone wrong, right down to the snappy internal dialogue that was Chandler's trademark. Chandler also added an element of morality into the tale that it didn't have in the book. And why does Walter kill Phyllis in the movie? I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that this doesn't happen in the book. If you're hooked on hardboiled fiction you should read this book. And although a lot of years have passed, maybe you'll appreciate why Cain was considered such a racy writer in his day, too.
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