The Postman Always Rings Twice

这并非一个关于善恶报应的犯罪故事，而是一桩被写进命运里的失败。两个走投无路的陌生人，被上帝临时吻了一下额头，尝尽了“全部的爱”，却承受不住那份过于炽热，像把飞机引擎塞进福特车里，轰然震碎。真正抓住读者的，是凶手以第一人称平静地叙述自己如何一步步走向绞刑台：他试图用“来生”骗自己，却在回忆科拉的海水与天空时，比任何神父的教义都更真切地信了来生。 Cain 的冷硬口语不煽情、不加修饰，恰恰让这份“爱恨交织、死也不能解脱”显得格外刺骨。它常被拿来和《局外人》对照，也常被批评为渲染色情暴力；但让读者“读到后面一直在冷笑”的，与其说是笑书中人，不如是笑我们自己——当两个“不中用的人”被命运推上山顶又摔落，那声铃响，究竟为谁而按。

James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892–October 27, 1977) was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hard-boiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the "roman noir." He was born into an Irish Catholic family in Annapolis, Maryland, the son of a prominent educator and an opera singer. He inherited his love for music from his mother, but his high hopes of starting a career as a singer himself were thwarted when she told him that his voice was not good enough. After graduating from Washington College where his father, James W. Cain served as president, in 1910, he began working as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun. He was drafted into the United States Army and spent the final year of World War I in France writing for an Army magazine. On his return to the United States he continued working as a journalist, writing editorials for the New York World and articles for American Mercury. He also served briefly as the managing editor of The New Yorker, but later turned to screenplays and finally to fiction. Although Cain spent many years in Hollywood working on screenplays, his name only appears on the credits of three films, Algiers, Stand Up and Fight, and Gypsy Wildcat. His first novel (he had already published Our Government in 1930), The Postman Always Rings Twice was published in 1934. Two years later the serialized, in Liberty Magazine, Double Indemnity was published. He made use of his love of music and of the opera in particular in at least three of his novels: Serenade (about an American opera singer who loses his voice and who, after spending part of his life south of the border, re-enters the States illegally with a Mexican prostitute in tow), Mildred Pierce (in which, as part of the subplot, the only daughter of a successful businesswoman trains as an opera singer) and Career in C Major (a short semi-comic novel about the unhappy husband of an aspiring opera singer who unexpectedly discovered that he has a better voice than she does). He continued writing up to his death at the age of 85. His last three published works, The Baby in the Icebox (1981), Cloud Nine (1984) and The Enchanted Isle (1985) being published posthumously. However, the many novels he published from the late 1940s onward never quite rivaled his earlier successes.