mikerickson reviewed Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (Vintage crime/Black Lizard)
Review of 'Double Indemnity' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A single man meets a married woman and they immediately start plotting to kill her husband for money and love. No, I'm not talking about The Postman Always Rings Twice, but you can be forgiven for thinking so because both that book and this one were written by the same author a year apart. But cheeky similarities aside, there's enough going on here to set it apart as a distinct (and in my opinion better) story.
Walter Huff, an insurance agent, made for an interesting flawed protagonist: I never wanted him to succeed or fail at his schemes, but I was investing in seeing how it played out. He had a meticulous mind for planning, especially when it came to establishing multiple alibis that could be corroborated after the fact. Problem was, he wasn't the only one setting machinations into motion.
The inciting incident and the motivation of the …
A single man meets a married woman and they immediately start plotting to kill her husband for money and love. No, I'm not talking about The Postman Always Rings Twice, but you can be forgiven for thinking so because both that book and this one were written by the same author a year apart. But cheeky similarities aside, there's enough going on here to set it apart as a distinct (and in my opinion better) story.
Walter Huff, an insurance agent, made for an interesting flawed protagonist: I never wanted him to succeed or fail at his schemes, but I was investing in seeing how it played out. He had a meticulous mind for planning, especially when it came to establishing multiple alibis that could be corroborated after the fact. Problem was, he wasn't the only one setting machinations into motion.
The inciting incident and the motivation of the characters to carry out literal premeditated murder was kind of lacking in my opinion. Love-at-first-sight sounds like the kind of thing better saved for children's fantasy stories, but maybe the original audience for this book also accepted at face value that a guy would go starry-eyed over the right woman. It felt like Cain just wanted to get the story going, justification be damned. Maybe were it written today this factor would've been strengthened somewhat, but it wasn't enough to take away from my overall enjoyment of the book.
This was a classic, "no one really comes out on top" kind of tale with all those good noir tropes you'd expect from a story set in 1930's Los Angeles, especially featuring one of my favorite femme fatale characters of the genre. It's a fun, short, Rube-Goldberg machine of a book if that's what you're looking for.
