Cain is known as a novelist of the "hard-boiled" school, but the designation strikes me as covering too many other diverse writers and not saying anything about Cain's essential quality. Double Indemnity was published last year along with two other Cain stories in a volume called Three of a Kind. To that volume Cain has contributed a revealing preface on how he came to write the sort of fiction he does, and what sort he thinks it is [see excerpt above]. It makes some sense, as a writer's self-scrutiny often does. But Cain is too apologetic to see himself and his America whole.

Whatever the characters and plots of Cain's novels, there is always pretty much the same theme running through them. It is the theme of love and death coiled up with each other like fatal serpents. It is love-in-death and death-and-rebirth-in-love. Cain's idea as a writing technician is that if you mix a potion of love with the powerful ingredient of murder, then you get the strongest light possible shed on the love story. It is what he calls "murder as the love-rack." And in both Double Indemnity and in his minor classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice, you get the same theme: of a man and woman, powerfully drawn to each other, who commit murder for love and money, and then "find that the earth is not big enough for two persons who share such a dreadful secret, and eventually turn on each other." Thus, more than any other contemporary writer, Cain has become the novelist-laureate of the crime of passion in America.

He takes his task seriously, and aims at getting his characters caught in the same grip of fatality that the Greek tragedians did. If he fails it is partly because of the phony tensions in a Cain story. The mills of the Greeks' gods ground slowly, but terribly. Cain thunders ahead like a movie of an express train rounding a series of curves at full speed. He has, he confesses, "the habit of needling a story at the least hint of a letdown." Which explains why reading one of his stories is like taking a hypo of adrenalin.

Cain bridles a bit at Edmund Wilson's accusation that he has the Hollywood touch. In one sense Wilson is right—in terms of pace and shock and formula writing. But the formula is, in Cain's case, generally too stiff a dose for Hollywood. It is a bit hard to think of other Cain books in the movies. The love-amidst-death story in The Postman would scarcely get by the Hays-Breen office. Cain's characters have a way of celebrating their love in ghoulish surroundings. That applies in Love's Lovely Counterfeit, which is a story of love, politics, racketeering, and murder in a Midwestern city. And it applies, with a curious twist, to the best of Cain's novels—Serenade, where one of the high spots is a church scene that would pull Hollywood's pillars down on any director that ventured it. And it is equally hard to think of filming the mother-daughter mixup in Mildred Pierce.

In the end, however, no matter how much excitement a Cain story furnishes me, I am left not enriched, but with a sense of emptiness. I think it is because Cain always aims at getting a story that is a "natural." That is to say, something perfect for his "love-rack" formula. But the formula by itself won't do. While the characters are racked, I am not. Their motivations leave me baffled, and their love turns out to be sawdust.

That may be why, at the end of his preface, Cain seems to be saying farewell to this sort of story, and promises that he will turn to "tales of a little wider application." I shall be waiting for them. (pp. 47-8)