I’m getting up tight now, and I’ve been thinking about Cora. Do you think she knows I didn’t do it? After what we said in the water, you would think she would know it. But that’s the awful part, when you monkey with murder. Maybe it went through her head, when the car hit, that I did it anyhow. That’s why I hope I’ve got another life after this one. Father McConnell says I have, and I want to see her. I want her to know that it was all so, what we said to each other, and that I didn’t do it. What did she have that makes me feel that way about her? I don’t know. She wanted something, and she tried to get it. She tried all the wrong ways, but she tried. I don’t know what made her feel that way about me, because she knew me. She called it on me plenty of times, that I wasn’t any good. I never really wanted anything, but her. But that’s a lot. I guess it’s not often that a woman even has that.
There’s a guy in No. 7 that murdered his brother, and says he didn’t really do it, his subconscious did it. I asked him what that meant, and he says you got two selves, one that you know about and the other that you don’t know about, because it’s subconscious. It shook me up. Did I really do it, and not know it? God Almighty, I can’t believe that! I didn’t do it! I loved her so, then, I tell you, that I would have died for her! To hell with the subconscious. I don’t believe it. It’s just a lot of hooey, that this guy thought up so he could fool the judge. You know what you’re doing, and you do it. I didn’t do it, I know that. That’s what I’m going to tell her, if I ever see her again.
I’m up awful tight, now. I think they give you dope in the grub, so you don’t think about it. I try not to think. Whenever I can make it, I’m out there with Cora, with the sky above us, and the water around us, talking about how happy we’re going to be, and how it’s going to last forever. I guess I’m over the big river, when I’m there with her. That’s when it seems real, about another life, not with all this stuff how Father McConnell has got it figured out. When I’m with her I believe it. When I start to figure, it all goes blooey.
No stay.
Here they come. Father McConnell says prayers help. If you’ve got this far, send up one for me, and Cora, and make it that we’re together, wherever it is.
JAMES M. CAIN
James Mallahan Cain (1892–1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for The Cross of Lorraine, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literay career that included a professorship at St. John’s College in Annapolis and a stint at The New Yorker as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain’s famous first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain’s other novels, Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
Books by James M. Cain
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Mildred Pierce
Double Indemnity
Three by Cain
BOOKS BY JAMES M. CAIN
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
From the master of crime fiction whom Edmund Wilson called the “poet of the tabloid murder” comes a tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful novel that gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, Double Indemnity reaffirms James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.
Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72322-6
MILDRED PIERCE
Mildred Pierce has gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She has used those attributes to survive a divorce and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also has two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements comes a work of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.
Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72321-9
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
An amoral young tramp, a beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband, and a problem that has only one grisly solution—a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a gripping testament to James M. Cain’s unsparing vision of America’s bleak underside.
Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72325-7
ALSO AVAILABLE
Three by Cain, 978-0-679-72323-3
VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD
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James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
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