Double Indemnity (1943).
By James M. Cain.
Published by Vintage
Crime/Black Lizard.
Paperback.
ISBN-10: 9780679723226
ISBN-13: 978-0679723226
Description:
“An American
masterpiece.” – Ross Macdonald.
Walter Huff was an
insurance salesman with an unfailing instinct for clients who might be in
trouble, and his instinct led him to Phyllis Nirdlinger. Phyllis wanted to buy
an accident policy on her husband. Then she wanted her husband to have an
accident. Walter wanted Phyllis. To get her, he would arrange the perfect
murder and betray everything he had ever lived for.
Tautly narrated and
excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of
guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that
devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel
reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir.
“No
one has ever stopped reading in the middle of one of Jim Cain’s books.” – Saturday
Review of Literature.