James M. Cain published 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' in 1934. It is a short novel that barely reaches one hundred pages in length. A new, as the French would classify it, So much so that at the time its sale was prohibited in places like Boston and other states of the Union, described as obscene.
Over time, Cain's novel has become one of the reference classics of the American black genre, to the point that the Mystery Writers Association of America included it in its totemic list of the hundred best novels of the mystery of all time.
‘The postman always rings twice’ is concise. Even the telegraphic, at times. And yet, everything is there. The start, for example: “At about noon I was thrown from the hay truck. I had climbed into it the night before, at the border, and as soon as I lay down under the tarpaulin I fell fast asleep. He was badly in need of that sleep, after the three weeks he had just spent in Tijuana, and he was still asleep when the truck pulled to the side of the road to let the engine cool down. Then they saw a foot stick out from under the tarp and they threw me out onto the road."
Isn't it as if the author were speaking to us about a birth, about a delivery? For the purposes of what happens next, that's right. Because right where you get off the truck, there is a roadside bar and a service station. Frank goes in for a drink, but he doesn't have a penny to pay with and ends up staying to work at the gas station.
The owner is a Greek, an older guy named Nick Papadakis. He is married to Cora, a woman quite a bit younger than him... and very fed up with his married life, so it doesn't take long for passion to soar. Frank and Cora begin a very turbulent relationship.
Frank, a drifter by vocation, proposes to run away to Cora.
- Where to?
- "Anywhere, what does it matter?"
- "Anywhere... anywhere." Do you know where that is?
- "All over the map, wherever we want."
- "No, it's not there. It's the cafeteria.
I wasn't referring to the café but to the road. It's going to be fun, Cora. No one knows it better than me...
But not. Cora was not attracted to life on the road. Nor become a vagabond. Cora had a plan. Or, if not a plan, at least an idea: eliminate her husband and keep the business. Only plans can go wrong, as they do with Frank and Cora.
And the donkey back to wheat. Because Frank has seen the ears of the wolf, to continue with rural and agricultural similes.
- You, me, and the road.
- You, me, and the road.
- Two homeless people.
- Two tramps, but always together.
- "That's right, always together."
Cora, however, can be very convincing. And although she tries, she doesn't see herself with the strength to follow Frank, who seems to break the umbilical cord that unites him to The Twin Oaks, the name of Papadakis and Cora's joint.
In the noir genre, as you already know, fate, fatalism, and predetermination play a basic role in the biographies of their heroes. Let them tell Michael Corleone in 'The Godfather III'!: "Just when I think I'm out, they involve me again."
After being ripped off by a pool hustler—at this point, how can you not remember Robert Rossen's The Hustler, played by Paul Newman—Frank will return to the service station. And into Cora's arms. And to hatch a plan to eliminate her husband. The moment of Papadakis's death is strangely and sinisterly poetic: he is singing in the middle of an area of great mountains that echo the notes of his voice back to him when he receives the final and final blow to the head with a spanner: “ his skull cracked and I felt him sink. His body shrank back and he was all curled up in the seat, like a cat on a sofa. It seemed to me that an eternity passed before he froze. And then Cora took a sharp breath that ended in a moan. Because at that moment the echo returned the note of the Greek. It was the same high note, going up, and stopping and waiting."
And it is that Papadakis liked to sing: at the end of the working day at the gas station, he used to take an instrument and liven up the night with some cooing. The same ones who accompanied him in his death.
'The postman always rings twice' continues with a terrible sequence in which the fate of the Greek theater - Papadakis's nationality is no coincidence - shakes hands with Eros and Thanatos: with Frank and Cora smeared with blood after carrying out what should be a perfect crime.
From there, the investigation by the police, the lawyers, the trial, the sentence, and the outcome. Cruel? Bitter? Could be. Fate, in any case. Let's not forget the mockery of fate. The factum we talked about before.
Cora utters a memorable speech: “Look Frank: we are nothing more than two wrecks. That night, God kissed us on the forehead and gave us everything that two people can have in this life. But we were not from the pasta of those who can have it. We had all that love and we didn't know how to defend it. Love is like a powerful airplane engine, with which one can fly to the top of the mountain; but if that engine; Instead of putting it on a plane, you put it on a Ford, it rips it apart in a few seconds. And we're just that, Frank: a couple of Fords. God is laughing at us from up there."
And there is the question of the novel's title since no postman appears in the story. Cain himself details in the prologue to 'Blood Pact', a novel that we will talk about later, a conversation with the screenwriter Vincent Lawrence, who told him how, when he wrote his first script and sent it to the producers, he was looking forward to the arrival from the postman every morning. And how did you know it was him? Because he always called twice. Cain liked the phrase and decided to use it as the title of his novel. Lawrence and he chatted about the title and came to the conclusion that it coincided with the meaning of the story: the postman would be the transcript of destiny, and the 'message', death for Frank and Cora for the murder of Papadakis. Because he sees that they had failed the first time and they could let it be. Even so, they relapsed in their homicidal purpose...
There is another explanation for the title, provided by the historian, journalist, and writer Judith Flanders, a specialist in the Victorian world. And it is that at that time, the postman called once to let him know that he had left the mail, without waiting for an answer. However, when he carried a telegram, he called twice. In Victorian times, telegrams were very expensive and were used primarily to deliver bad news. More or less like today, when a certificate arrives with acknowledgment of receipt: either it is from the Treasury or it is the notification of some fine, sanction, or penalty.
In the novel, the first call is the failed assassination attempt on Papadakis: fate gives them a chance to repent. The second ring is already the murder. And since fate is about to come true, Cora will die unexpectedly and absurdly, also aboard a car and Frank will pay, paradoxically, for the crime he did not commit. And there would be the bad news that comes through the telegrams.
There is a moment, in the novel when the legal mess that arises after the death of Papadakis becomes difficult to follow. It is confusing and tangled. It has to do with the difference between the North American and Spanish judicial systems, but it is also a narrative resource: as the novel is narrated in the first person, the chaos in which the reader is immersed is the same in which Frank, the narrator, is immersed. , who understands little or nothing of what is happening.
Do not let the reader think that Cain was a newcomer to that world and he did not know what he was talking about. J.M. Cain was born in 1892 in a city with a name of Hellenic reminiscences: Annapolis, near Baltimore. The son of a Catholic family of Irish origin, James Mallahan was the son of a renowned high school teacher and an opera singer. His childhood and youth were calm and peaceful.
His first artistic disappointment: when his mother told him that he didn't have a good enough voice to be a singer. After graduation, Cain was called up and participated in the aftermath of World War I in France, writing for an army magazine.
Bitten by the journalism bug, J.M. Cain joined the staff of The Baltimore Sun, doing a lot of news and red tape and court work, as we'll see later. In 1932 he began writing screenplays for Hollywood, initiating one of those stormy relationships with the Mecca of Cinema, given the inveterate habit of producers rewriting authors' scripts.
At the age of 42 and encouraged by Henry Mencken, the director of The Baltimore Sun, he wrote his first novel: 'The postman always rings twice', a great sales success despite the prohibition in certain states, accused of obscenity.
The novels that he wrote in the 40s of the 20th century were the most celebrated by critics and the public, with notable sales successes. Although J.M. Cain continued writing until the end of his days, in 1977, he did not return to green the old laurels that place him on the podium of the masters of classic American noir, along with Chandler and Hammett.
