A recent reflection on the Orion Crime Masterworks series that first got me into classic-era crime and detective fiction has brought me back to Double Indemnity (1936) by James M. Cain, the sixth title in that series and my first proper encounter with anything Noir-ish on the page.

Insurance salesman Walter Huff calls on a customer about continuing his soon-to-expire policy and, since the man isn’t in, meets his wife Phyllis Nirdlinger instead. Instantly attracted to the woman — “Under those blue pyjamas was a shape to set a man nuts…” — Huff is put slightly on edge when she enquires about accident insurance for her husband, though not so on edge that he doesn’t return to the Nirdlinger house, make it clear he finds the lady attractive, and, it is heavily implied, sleep with her. And then they begin to discuss that accident insurance again, and to look at a scheme that could net the pair of them $50,000 (some $1.1 million in today’s terms).

Put down like this, the opening chapters of Double Indemnity sound ridiculous, but, while it must be admitted that Huff goes from never hearing of the woman to plotting an ingenious murder for her in less time than it takes most people to clean their teeth, this is the very essence of the Noir-tinged classic setup that would recur in the genre all the way through the work of Jim Thompson to screen classics like Body Heat (1981). Just as one must accept the serendipitous presence of the genius detective as a baffling crime occurs in much of the Golden Age’s work — as expertly parodied by Leo Bruce in Case for Three Detectives (1936) in the same year Double Indemnity was published — the simple fact is that we’re here for the femme to be fatale and for some poor sucker to be pulled into the maelstrom created by the irresistible urge to possess her.

Cain, though, much like Bruce, has an eye on something slightly bigger than a simple tale of a weak man drawn into error by his libidinous urges. Much of the book concentrates first on the psychology of two people convincing themselves that murder is not only acceptable but somehow right, as if they’re doing their future victim a favour, and then on the moral aspect of defrauding Walter’s company out of the money — hell, the two long paragraphs which close out chapter 2, in which he reflects on how insurance is a business that puts up a front of caring about its customers but is actually out only to take their money and keep it, should probably be far more famous than anything else that happens in this book because they’re amazing.

Cain also has an eye on the pitch black humour that so often finds its home in this subgenre, with perhaps the best joke occurring when Mr. Nirdlinger breaks his leg and ex-nurse Phyllis worries about the extra activity they’re forcing him through just so she and Walter can kill him:

“[G]etting a broken leg case out of bed too soon…It’s almost certain to affect the length. Make one shorter than the other, I mean.”

Alongside this, Cain also writes some of the purest diamond-hard prose you’re ever likely to find (“For the next twenty minutes we were in the jaws of death…”), with our central pair carrying out the murder and deception to hide that it is murder in a manner that positively bristles with little moments of human frailty. These two may have hardened their hearts and minds to the route they’ve opted to follow, but Cain allows them to retain their humanity both during the key actions and afterwards. A lovely scene sees Walter, safe from suspicion as far as he knows, finally allowing the magnitude of what he’s done sweep over him, and singing ‘Isle of Capri’ to try and steady his nerves.

So far, so Noir. But a reckoning must be barrelling, locomotive-like, towards them, and Cain again tweaks what might be an expected structure by having the act of murder not just transform Walter but, in that transformation, to shake also the foundations upon which the whole novel has been built to this point, and to alter his feelings towards Phyllis irreparably. We are at this point about halfway through the book, and so I should be circumspect about what follows, but the form of Walter’s reckoning has been neatly sewn into the fabric of the narrative very neatly. Motives and actions suddenly become suspect in the best Noir fashion and — with the insurance company investigating and keen to prove that Nirdlinger’s death was not an accident, thus saving them the cost of paying out on the policy — the dream begins to turn sour.

We get here, then, the chief difference between the classic detective plot that was so popular when this was published and the crime novel that would, in the decades ahead, begin to edge out its more intricate brethren. Cain’s surprises, while feeling organic, don’t have about them the crushing inevitability of a longer and more carefully plotted book. This is not to criticise Cain’s plotting at all — he employs some genius-level conceits, such as the ways by which Walter is able to establish that no-one phoned him or called on him during the fatal hours he is out setting up the Nirdlinger tapestry — but rather, I suppose to reflect how I, as a much older and more seasoned reader of this genre, come to this story now, 20+ years later, compared to the ingénue I was when first blown away by the darkness of Cain’s amorality.

We walk here a tightrope between the traditional novel of seeded plot developments and the newly-emerging crime novel that is able to simply throw a development at your head and cackle as you try to duck out of its way. My limited experience with Noir has seen certain authors walk this equally brilliantly — The Bride Wore Black (1940) by Cornell Woolrich, say — and it’s to be wondered how much the subgenre owes to Cain’s invention and startling reversals here. It’s a bravura performance, and feels like it would leave a long and influential tail for other authors to cross into a take a great amount of inspiration from.

The only other point of discussion that seems worthwhile is whether or not this qualifies as an inverted mystery. I seemed to remember that the eventual solution was brought about by investigation, and that we were, through Walter’s nervous monitoring of the situation at work, given some sense of how those investigations were progressing. As it turns out — quelle surprise — my recollections on this front have gotten rather muddied by the literally thousands of books dragged across the trail in the years since I first read it and, well, my feeling now (others would disagree, no doubt) is that it’s not inverted at all.

An inverted mystery should ideally contain both a) the criminal being known to the reader from a moderately early stage and b) elements of the successful investigation that lead to the apprehension of that criminal. Something seen purely from the criminal’s perspective is simply a crime novel — and, hell, I’m guilty of getting the two mixed up down the years — and so, with my frustrations of the increasing misuse of ‘locked room’ paramount in my mind, I’m going to try and use the term Inverted Mystery properly from now on. And Double Indemnity isn’t one. Do not discuss.

What Double Indemnity is, however, is a bracing, intricately-plotted, and superbly-readable example of the Noir subgenre, and one that more than merited a revisit after the two decades it has spent living so positively in my memory. Jim Thompson’s career, coming later, when public attitudes to sex and violence in their literature had relaxed a little, would allow him to hit you harder in the gut and stand back to enjoy you squirming around on the floor, but the restraint enforced upon Cain makes his subtler ideas assault you that much more keenly. If doom is your tipple of choice and you’ve yet to savour this concoction, drink deeply of Cain’s cocktail of hope and despair — nearly 90 years on, it still packs a punch.