The Postman Always Rings Twice (novel)

The story is narrated in the first person by Frank Chambers, a young drifter who stops at a rural California diner for a meal and ends up working there. The diner is operated by a beautiful young woman, Cora, and her much older husband, Nick Papadakis, sometimes called "the Greek".

Frank and Cora feel an immediate attraction to each other and begin a passionate affair with sadomasochistic qualities. Cora is tired of her situation, married to a man she does not love and working at a diner that she wants to own and improve. Frank and Cora scheme to murder the Greek in order to start a new life together without Cora losing the diner.

They plan on striking Nick's head and making it seem he fell and drowned in the bathtub. Cora fells Nick with a solid blow, but a sudden power outage and the appearance of a policeman make the scheme fail. Nick recovers and because of retrograde amnesia does not suspect that he narrowly avoided being killed.

Determined to kill Nick, Frank and Cora fake a car accident. They ply Nick with wine, strike him on the head, and crash the car. Frank is also gravely injured in the crash, while Cora simulates minor injuries and bruises. The local prosecutor suspects what has actually occurred but does not have enough evidence to prove it. As a tactic intended to get Cora and Frank to turn on each other, he charges only Cora with the crime of Nick's murder, coercing Frank to sign a complaint against her.

Cora, furious and indignant, insists on offering a full confession detailing both their roles. Her lawyer tricks her into dictating that confession to a member of his own staff. Cora, believing her confession made, returns to prison. Though Cora would be sure to learn of the trickery, a few valuable hours are gained. The lawyer uses the time to manipulate the insurance companies financially interested in the trial to have their private detective recant his testimony, which was the final remaining weapon in the prosecution's arsenal. The state is forced to grant Cora a plea agreement under which she is given a suspended sentence and no jail time.

After the trial, Cora's diner begins to boom, but their relationship worsens. While Cora is attending her mother's funeral, Frank has an affair with a wild cat tamer. Upon returning home, Cora tells him that she is pregnant. However, she is also angered when she finds out about his affair.

Frank and Cora eventually patch things up, get married and plan a happy future and a family. Then Cora is killed in a car crash while Frank is driving. The book ends with Frank, from death row, summarizing the events that followed, explaining that he was wrongly convicted of murdering Cora. The text, he hopes, will be published after his execution.

The title is a red herring in that no postman appears or is even alluded to. The meaning of the title has therefore often been the subject of speculation. William Marling, for instance, suggested that Cain may have taken the title from the sensational 1927 case of Ruth Snyder, who, like Cora in Postman, had conspired with her lover to murder her husband. Cain used the Snyder case as an inspiration for his 1943 novel Double Indemnity;[3] Marling believed it was also a model for the plot and the title of Postman. In the real-life case, Snyder said she had prevented her husband from discovering the changes she had made to his life insurance policy by telling the postman to deliver the policy's payment notices only to her and instructing him to ring the doorbell twice as a signal indicating he had such a delivery for her.[4]

The historian Judith Flanders, however, has interpreted the title as a reference to postal customs in the Victorian era. When mail (post) was delivered, the postman knocked once to let the household know it was there: no reply was needed. When there was a telegram, however, which had to be handed over personally, he knocked twice so that the household would know to answer the door. Telegrams were expensive and usually the bringers of bad news: so a postman knocking (later, ringing) twice signaled trouble was on the way.[5]

In the preface to Double Indemnity, Cain wrote that the title of The Postman Always Rings Twice came from a discussion he had with the screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. According to Cain, Lawrence spoke of the anxiety he felt when waiting for the postman to bring him news on a submitted manuscript, noting that he would know when the postman had finally arrived because he always rang twice. In his biography of Cain, Roy Hoopes recounted the conversation between Cain and Lawrence, noting that Lawrence did not say merely that the postman always rang twice but also that he was sometimes so anxious waiting for the postman that he would go into his backyard to avoid hearing his ring. The tactic inevitably failed, Lawrence continued, because if the postman's first ring was not noticed, his second one, even from the backyard, would be.[6]

As a result of the conversation, Cain decided upon that phrase as a title for his novel. Upon discussing it further, the two men agreed such a phrase was metaphorically suited to Frank's situation at the end of the novel. With the "postman" being God or fate, the "delivery" meant for Frank was his own death as just retribution for murdering Nick. Frank had missed the first "ring" when he initially got away with that killing. However, the postman rang again and this time the ring was heard; Frank is wrongly convicted of having murdered Cora and then sentenced to die.[note 1] The theme of an inescapable fate is further underscored by the Greek's escape from death in the lovers' first murder attempt, only to be done in by their second one.

The Postman Always Rings Twice has been adapted many times, as a film (seven times), as an opera, as a radio drama, and as a play (twice).

• Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn In The Road), a 1939 French film directed by Pierre Chenal and starring Michel Simon as Nick
• Ossessione (Obsession), a 1943 Italian film directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Clara Calamai and Massimo Girotti
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), an American film starring Lana Turner and John Garfield, probably the best known of the film adaptations
• Chair de Poule (Goosebumps), a 1963 French film directed by Julien Duvivier, based on the 1960 novel Come Easy—Go Easy by James Hadley Chase, the key plot elements of which were drawn without acknowledgement from The Postman Always Rings Twice
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), an American film from a screenplay by David Mamet, directed by Bob Rafelson, and featuring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, a 1982 opera with a libretto adapted from the novel by Colin Graham and music by Stephen Paulus
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, adapted as a BBC radio drama in 1993 by Shaun McKenna and in 2013 by Charlotte Greig
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, a play adapted by Andrew Rattenbury, directed by Lucy Bailey and starring Val Kilmer
• Szenvedély ("Passion"), a 1998 Hungarian film adaptation
• Buai laju-laju ("Swing High, My Darling"), a 2004 Malaysian film adaptation by U-Wei Haji Saari
• Jerichow, a 2008 German film adaptation, set in a small town in the Eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt
• Почтальон всегда звонит дважды (пьеса) (The Postman Always Rings Twice), a 2008 play written and directed by Alexandre Marine and starring Kirill Safonov in its initial run, subsequently replaced by Daniil Strahov, at the Master Theatre in Moscow[7]

Streaming audio

• The Postman Always Rings Twice on Screen Guild Theater: June 16, 1947
• The Postman Always Rings Twice on Hollywood Sound Stage: January 24, 1952