Recommended reading - The Magician's Wife (1965):

The Magician's Wife

By James M. Cain.

Published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Published 1965.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0887480187

ISBN-13: 978-0887480188

Description:

In The Magician’s Wife, Cain returns to his classic themes of lust and greed. Clay Lockwood, a business executive, falls in love with the irresistible Sally Alexis, wife of a professional magician. Their story is one of the inexorable process of “wishes coming true” – the realization of which was always, for Cain, “a terrifying concept.”

James M. Cain was born in Annapolis in 1892. He lived and worked in Hollywood for seventeen years, and spent the last years of his life in Hyattsville, Maryland. His work, especially the best-sellers The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Butterfly, is known to millions in this country and abroad.