The Postman Always Rings Twice - with guest Rebecca Heisler!
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1934) is James M. Cain’s gripping, groundbreaking noir tale of passion and betrayal. In a dusty roadside diner, love and lust ignite a murderous plot and challenge conventional notions of right and wrong. As secrets unravel, two lovers are drawn deeper into a web of crime, leading to a shocking and morally ambiguous climax.
Read: Buy the book on Amazon.
Reflect: Check out the conversation starters below.
Our guest, Rebecca Heisler, lives outside Boston with her two rescue mutts, who are usually by her side while she's reading. Outside of her digital marketing day job, she can usually be found with a book, often recommending the most absurd genres to her book club. She also loves writing, drinking wine, and watching and reviewing every Hallmark Christmas movie each year.
Check her out @bookworminboston
And while you're at it, visit our mutual friend @readfarandwide for bookish travel tips.
One of the things we love about book conversations is how the discussion makes so many connections. For this episode, we made a special idea list, and compiled the links here! Check it out and let us know if we missed any references.
And while you're at it, pick up the next book here!
The Postman Always Rings Twice is on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels. Most elements of the hardboiled genre are here. Dark passions. Heroes of dubious morality/amorality in a hardscrabble world. Sudden, squalid violence. Retribution. Albert Camus said the book’s themes and style influenced The Stranger. Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone) has talked about the impact Cain’s dialogue had on him (full of vernacular; true to character). Cain featured the perpetrator of the crime, rather than the detective or law enforcement. Crime novelists owe a lot to Cain.
The book feels like another major departure from the types of books we’ve been reading — the brutality, the psychopathy, the sex. What was the context of this development? What was going on in American fiction? Is Cain the first to do this?
Did you like any of the characters? How did it feel to read the book from inside the killer’s head? For Sarah it was difficult, like having a one way conversation with a crazy person who wants to tell you all about themselves, thinks they have it figured out, but you don’t agree that they do.
In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Nick’s ethnic background is looked down upon, even by his wife. Her distaste for her husband is implied to derive in part from her perception that she is less “white” for being married to him. Mexicans are described as less worthy characters.
Desperation, driven by grinding Depression-era poverty, is key to the psychological landscape of the novel, driving Cora first to marriage and then to murder. She went into the marriage assuming that Nick was unchangeable (and maybe he was), but it was the burden she was willing to bear to get out of the hash house.
Cora also blames her class as to why she couldn’t make i
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