Double Indemnity

James Mallahan Cain was an American author, screenwriter, and investigative journalist. He is most well-known for pioneering the genre of hardboiled crime fiction, or crime fiction with stoic detectives as the protagonists. He is also well-known for popularizing the use of first-person confessionals in crime fiction, which he uses in Double Indemnity. Cain lived in California when he wrote Double Indemnity, which is also the setting for the novel.

Double Indemnity is loosely inspired by the case of Ruth Snyder, who murdered her abusive husband with her lover Judd Gray. The two of them planned to collect on her husband’s double indemnity clause. Their plot fell apart and they were executed by the state of New York.

Cain’s friend, Arthur Krock, suggested the motif of the insider double-agent, Walter Huff, to Cain. These suggestions came from stories from Krock’s own time as a journalist and some of the stories he had covered. Cain’s own experience as a journalist and network of friends and colleagues made him intimately familiar with the inner workings of white-collar crime.

Double Indemnity was published a year after Cain’s first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was banned in the city of Boston on obscenity charges. Similarly, Double Indemnity was not made into a film the year it was released because of objections by the Hays Office. The Hays Office was a regulator of Hollywood that policed films for supposedly morally corrupting material to protect audiences.

While working as a journalist, Cain covered the Battle of Blair Mountain, a strike by coal miners in West Virginia that the United States government tried to stop through violent force in 1921. Cain interviewed coal miners about the struggles they faced and was impressed by their eloquence and vividness. Influenced by these experiences taking testimony as an investigative journalist, Cain endeavored to reflect real people and their ways of speaking in his writing, and did not view his work as particularly sensationalist,. Cain saw his writing as an extension of the American people and their ways of storytelling.