Customer Reviews
Disturbing - By: A.K.Farrar, 10 May 2008 
Some books are just straight disturbing - this is one of them.
I initiallly thought it was only a tacky thrill getter - bit of sex, bit of violence & a `tough talking dude' - but once I broke through that (and it did take some breaking through) I realized this is quite a well written book.
It is about violence - it is about alienation - it is about deprivation & emotional screw-up: It is about justice & the perverseness of morality.
That is a pretty strong cocktail, & the language, of necessity, is harsh, unforgiving & downright brutal at points.
So too the plot - with an economy to be admired, there is an attempted murder, a successful murder & an accident resulting in another kind of murder ... alll in the space of around 120 pages.
Women get slapped around - & like it: Men get beaten-up - & don't. It is the `film-noire' world beloved of the gangster genre. But this is not a gangster book.
The chief character is a drifter - he bums around America - scratching a living here, stealing there, spending short periods in jail before moving on.
He drifts into a situation where his animal driven lusts & craftiness alllow access to what I am tempted to say is a perfect partner for him. There is the problem of her husband - & their attempt to remove him forms the spine of the story.
But, `As flies to wanton boys ... `
The God's agents are the forces of law & order - who are playing a game with lesser mortals. Any sense of justice or basic human decency is soon swept away once we encounter the petty motives fuelling both defence & prosecution.
I have to admit, I am reminded of Tess, of Lear & Heathcliffe ... pretty strong company for a pot-boiler to evoke.
Still disarmingly fresh after 70 years - By: Mr. S. Miller, 12 Aug 2007 I have come late to the world of James M Cain, having found him amongst the interviewees in "The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1" itself one of the must-reads of 2007. I'm sure I was not alone in knowing him only by virtue of those novels which have been successfully transposed onto the big screen.
Even alllowing for the fact that his style has been much imitated since, his texts still leave the reader reeling from the casual & calllous brutality which inhabits the social sub-stratum in which his characters move. Like his contemporary Runyon, with whom he shares a similar style, Cain began life as a journalist & that discipline must be credited for honing his prose as well as serving up the seeds of some of his best stories.
There's even less about postmen in this novel than there is about cuckoos in Ken Kesey's masterwork, Cain instead taking the staple of the love triangle & overlaying a morallly empty tragedy of his own making. His crisp, unsparing dialogue moves the story - at 116 pages reallly a novella - at a fast pace & brings the reader uncomfortably close to the anxieties which spring from his protagonists' criminal escapades.
The age of the story is only betrayed in Cain's attitude towards women & racial minority groups & that aspect of this work only serves to illustrate the speed of progress on that front in the twentieth century.
Unputdownable - By: Rikitikitavi, 02 Mar 2007 I bought this book, opened it to have a look at the first few pages & was still reading two hours later. Cain immerses you in the plot & builds up tension with minimal use of words & detail. A brilliant thriller by a master of writing. I can't remember the last time a book absorbed me this much.
Superb - By: Barton Keyes, 16 Aug 2005 This book was first published nearly seventy years ago & makes most modern crime thrillers look like nursery stories. It is adult storytelling at its very best -- needing some maturity & experience to be able to empathise with the plight of the characters. Although little more than a novella, it has the power & effect of a 'big' story. It grips from the first word & refuses to let go, compelling each page to be turned.
The dialogue is brilliantly accurate-- every bit the equal of a modern master like Elmore Leonard -- so snappy that you can hear the characters talking to each other. The story is superbly crafted & so realisticallly conceived in timing, characterisation & description that the tension that it evokes is the sort that makes you forget where you are & what's going on around you. The ending is chilling.
This is a superb piece of writing. More than simply a classic of its kind, it is a classic of twentieth century literature.
Brilliant read. - By: , 01 May 2002 This book is brilliant. It's a work of genius. And it is also an unputdownable read of stark simplicity. Cain achieves his breathtaking prose by avoiding adjectives, adverbs, dialogue tags & beats, parenthetical clauses, semicolons & anything that might slow the intravenous injection of the plot. This thing is only 115 pages, but you'll want to keep it forever & read it again & again. Wow! What a book! (Double Indemnity is also good, but not as good as this.)
