Postman Always Rings Twice

'One of the great crime novels of all time' Tony Parsons, Express'Nobody has ever quite pulled it off the way Cain does, not Hemingway, and not even Raymond Chandler' Tom Wolfe'It is no accident that movies based on three [of Cain's novels] helped to define the genre known as film noir' NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS'The most starkly elemental thing that has been written for years' EVENING STANDARDThe torrid story of Frank Chambers, the amoral drifter, Cora, the sullen and brooding wife, and Nick Papadakis, the amiable but inconvenient husband, has become a classic of its kind, and established Cain as a major novelist with a spare and vital prose style and a bleak vision of America.

One of the great crime novels of all time, It is no accident that movies based on three [of Cain's novels] helped to define the genre known as film noir, Cain has established a formidable reputation of furious pace, harsh and masterful realism, tough, raw speech right out of the mouths of the people, A sensational achievement ... the story of a man and a woman whose passion, at first crude and then tender, drives them to murder, has a pitiless brevity that has its own magnificence, The most starkly elemental thing that has been written for years

James M. Cain was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1892. Having served in the US Army in World War 1, he became a journalist in Baltimore and New York in the 1920's. He later worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Cain died in 1977.