The Postman Always Rings Twice

Hypothesising here, but whatever it is it's too big to go through your letterbox. He rings twice to see if you're in. He can't be arsed to ring a third time. Maybe?

In "Murder on the Love Rack," the tenth chapter of CAIN: The Biography of James M. Cain (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), Roy Hoopes
details the history of Cain's famously enigmatic title for his first novel. According to Hoopes, Cain originally titled the work Bar-B-Que, but the publisher
Alfred Knopf who was considering publishing the novel objected to the title and suggested For Love or Money instead. Cain hated Knopf's title because he
found it generic, the sort of title that seems designed to market any sensationalistic book or movie. In return, Cain offered to call the book Black Puma or
The Devil's Checkbook, but Knopf rejected these as well. Hoopes reports that finally, during a conversation with the playwright and screenwriter Vincent
Lawrence--Cain's best friend in Hollywood, and the person to whom he ultimately dedicated this novel--came up with the title The Postman Always Rings
Twice. The two writers had been commiserating over the agonies of waiting for the postman each day to find out the latest news on their submitted
manuscripts. Lawrence said that he would sometimes go out into his backyard to avoid hearing the postman come but complained that the postman always
rang twice to make sure he was heard. This anecdote put Cain in mind of an old English and Irish tradition according to which the postman always rang (or
knocked) twice to announce himself. Cain pitched the title to his friend and Lawrence agreed that this metaphor was well suited as a description for the fate
of Frank Chambers. Knopf, of course, accepted the title, and Hoopes notes that this title, with its rather obscure meaning, may in fact have contributed to
the controversy that fueled the novel's huge success.

I got that by googling. I'm not a Cainologist or anything. Great book though.

Bloody hell! I was approaching correctitude!

My postman leaves my manuscripts under the mat. Took me a couple of times of telling, mind. The Postman Always Needs Telling Twice.

There's a lot of mirrored pairs of events in the novel, so that sense of getting two chances seems thematically relevant too.

Thanks for finding that out Scott. And yeah there are a lot of mirrored pairs of events in the novel. James Hadley Chase seems to have based most of his novels on this book. If I remember correctly then it was this book which inspired him to start writing.

I always thought that it was some kind of spy thing, like "that must be the secret instructions arriving...wait a minute, that's not our postman, he only rang once!"

"Postman" and "Double Indemnity" are brilliant, examples of novels that transcend their genre. I read somewhere that Camus claimed it as an influence on "L'Etranger".

'Mildred Pierce' is a goodie too (though I do prefer the movie).

Horace McCoy's "They Shoot Horses Don't they?" was a big influence on Camus and those French Left Bank types too. That is one bleak novel, the movie is quite chipper in comparison.

I'm tempted to start a thread on that 'transcended their genre' line - it's something I very much don't believe in. I think great examples of books within genres are still examples of their genre. I think that the phrase implies that genres are limiting in more ways than is the case - they don't impose limits on quality at all. Since we're talking crime, there is lots of crime fiction that is great literature by any sane measure. Some of the best of it, interestingly, fails some of the standard genre tests (Chandler's mysteries famously sometimes fell apart under examination). Most of Cain's work was within the crime genre, and they are great books not because they transcend the genre or despite the genre or anything like that. The dimensions of genre and quality aren't in competition, though I don't know that I'd go as far as claiming they are orthogonal either, given how many genre writers drearily follow established templates. This is less easy in the mainstream, perhaps, because there are far less clear templates on offer - but I think that's just an encouragement, a crutch, for second raters and worse, not an impediment to genuine talents.