Why Is It Called The Postman Always Rings Twice? The Strange Story Behind James M. Cain's Title

There is a small problem with The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain's savage 1934 crime novel.

No postman turns up. Nobody waits for a letter. The title is never explained by a helpful character leaning against a counter.

Instead, Cain gives us a drifter, a roadside lunchroom, a married woman and a murder plot that looks straightforward for approximately three minutes.

The title is a warning about what happens after the criminals believe they have escaped. Its origins, however, are considerably more peculiar than a literary symbol dreamed up at a desk.

The Diner at the End of the Road

Frank Chambers arrives in California with little money and fewer plans. Nick Papadakis offers him work at a roadside filling station and restaurant. Nick's wife, Cora, gives Frank a reason to stay, and the pair soon decide that a husband is an inconvenient obstacle to their future.

This is the machinery of The Postman Always Rings Twice: attraction, calculation, violence and the increasingly unpleasant business of living with the result.

Cain wastes remarkably little time on explanations. Frank narrates in the blunt, impatient language of a man who has spent his life talking himself out of trouble.

Cain had moved to California after a career in journalism and a disappointing spell in Hollywood.

According to biographer Roy Hoopes, the story took shape partly from Cain's recollection of a woman at a filling station he visited, who was later reported to have killed her husband.

The detail was not an established case file so much as the spark that gave a novelist a dangerous idea.

His working title was Bar-B-Que.

It was geographically appropriate and commercially dreadful.

Fortunately, Cain had a friend with a better line.

The Title Came from a Nervous Screenwriter

That friend was Vincent Lawrence, a Hollywood screenwriter who helped Cain think through the story's romantic complications.

Lawrence recalled the torment of waiting for a response to a manuscript he had submitted. He watched for the postman, then tried hiding in the garden to escape the suspense.

It made no difference: the postman rang twice, and Lawrence could still hear him.

Cain seized on the phrase.

In Hoopes's account, published in The Washington Post in 1981, Lawrence immediately recognised its relevance to Frank Chambers.

It sounded ordinary, almost domestic, yet carried a promise of something that would not be ignored.

This is the strongest documented explanation for the title, rather than the various legends about postal regulations or a secret code used by murderous lovers.

The expression came from a writer waiting for news.

Cain turned it into a sentence of doom.

The Postman Is Fate

The novel makes its metaphor brutally clear without putting a uniformed messenger on the page.

Frank and Cora's first attempt to kill Nick fails. Their next succeeds, and they manoeuvre through the consequences without being convicted of his murder.

For a moment, they appear to have won.

But Cain's characters are not good at living with victory. Suspicion, guilt and resentment creep into the relationship that murder was supposed to rescue.

Then Cora dies in a car accident.

Frank, innocent of her death, is convicted of killing her and faces execution. He escaped punishment for the crime he committed, only to be condemned for one he did not.

The first ring was the warning he ignored. The second is the arrival of judgment.

It is less a story about a clever killer being caught than about fate refusing to accept a change of address.

Hollywood Had to Wait for the Second Ring

The book's frank treatment of sex and murder caused problems almost immediately.

Hollywood recognised its appeal, but the Production Code Administration considered the material unsuitable for the screen. MGM acquired the rights in 1934, then spent years trying to make a film acceptable to the censors.

The delay produced an odd chronology.

French director Pierre Chenal made Le Dernier Tournant in 1939; Luchino Visconti followed with the unlicensed Italian adaptation Ossessione in 1943.

Only in 1946 did MGM release its American version, starring Lana Turner and John Garfield.

That film softened elements of the novel, including the relationship's sexual aggression and the portrayal of Nick.

Another American adaptation, directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, arrived in 1981.

Different decades, different limits on what the camera could show, same appalling choices.

Cain's book, meanwhile, remained a model of compression. The Library of America includes it in its landmark collection of American noir, and its influence rests as much on the pace and voice as on the murder itself.

The Knock That Never Stops

So, why is it called The Postman Always Rings Twice?

Because Cain found a commonplace phrase and made it sound like an appointment nobody could cancel.

The postman does not need to appear.

The whole point is that the message arrives anyway.

For more literature with its hands dirty, explore Hellwood's James M. Cain T-Shirt, Classic Crime Fiction T-Shirt Collection and Classic Pulp Fiction T-Shirts.

The related Mildred Pierce T-Shirt offers another glimpse of Cain's talent for making respectable domestic life feel dangerous.

JAMES M. CAIN T-SHIRT

Desire. Deception. Murder. The American dream with the lights switched off.

A Hellwood tribute to James M. Cain, the master of American noir fiction whose extraordinary novels helped establish the language of literary crime and inspired some of Hollywood's greatest thrillers.

Featuring Cain's illustrated portrait, atmospheric noir imagery and references to The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce.

VIEW THE JAMES M. CAIN T-SHIRT