"That is all. Your Honor, I plead her guilty on both charges."
If he had dropped a bomb in that courtroom, he couldn't have stirred it up quicker. Reporters rushed out, and photographers reached up to the desk to get pictures. They kept bumping into each other, and the magistrate got sore and began banging for order. Sackett looked like he had been shot, and all over the place there was a roar like somebody had all of a sudden shoved a seashell up against your ear. I kept trying to see Cora's face. But all I could get of it was the corner of her mouth. It kept twitching, like somebody was jabbing a needle into it about once every second.

Chandler, Hammett and Cain are "The Big Three" when it comes to noir/hardboiled fiction, and after having sampled the other two I figured it was time to give Cain his turn. What I got was a surprisingly short book I finished in one day that left me initially disappointed, but more appreciative the more I think about it. It's pulling me in a few different directions and I'm finding it hard to give this one an overall score so I'll just play it safe and go down the middle. The things I liked about this book I really liked and the things I didn't I really didn't.

As with all of these older noir novels and novellas, I have to remind myself that they're a product of their time and that it's not exactly fair to judge them by the same standards I would a contemporary work of my own time. Sure enough, women are getting punched and slapped, and casual antisemitism makes an appearance for no discernible reason, but at least there's no out-of-left-field homophobia that I've come to expect from this genre.

The characters in this book really felt like characters though in that they didn't feel like actual real-life people. Even though there's nothing speculative about this fiction at all, there was still a bit of suspension of disbelief required for me to get into it. Our protagonist, Frank Chambers, is a self-professed rambler who just kind of keeps moving for its own sake and doesn't like to sit still in one town for too long. He strikes up an almost immediate love affair with the first woman we encounter with hardly any words passing between them. This is so far removed from my real-world experience that I might as well roll with it and try not to read too much into it.

But once things got moving, I was super into it. You got multiple murder plots, the most convoluted court case that turns into a media spectacle, double-crossings, shady cops, shadier lawyers, blackmailers, and a bunch of other good stuff. I'm absolutely here for all that. And when the dust settles and these characters can move on, there's a rather abrupt ending that felt jarring at first, but made more sense the more I sat on it. I was spending too much time hyperfocused on the minutiae of individual scenes, but backing out to view the story as a whole shows that there was a coherent theme and purpose to everything that happened, which really came together for me when I realized what the title meant (it's not intuitive at first).

I've been kind of treating myself to shorter books this month to actually make a dent in my physical TBR pile, but ironically I wish that this one had been longer. Stretch out the courtship between Frank and Cora into something believable, and lean into the planning and execution scenes. I think the overall work could have been padded with a little more development without sacrificing the short punchy style of sentences and witty dialogue that the genre is known for, but it was enjoyable for what it was.