Double Indemnity audiobook

‭Double indemnity , James Mallahan CainDouble Indemnity is a 1943 crime novel, written by American journalist-turned-novelist James M. Cain. Walter Huff, an insurance agent, falls for the married Phyllis Nirdlinger, who consults him about accident insurance for her unsuspecting husband. In spite of his instinctual decency, and intrigued by the challenge of committing the perfect murder, Walter is seduced into helping the femme fatale kill her husband for the insurance money. After killing him in the Nirdlinger car, they stage an accident from the rear platform of a train. But they cannot enjoy their success. The crime backfires on them, and soon afterwards, with the insurance company's claim manager Barton Keyes becoming more and more suspicious of them, he decides to kill her, too "for what she knew about me, and because the world isn't big enough for two people once they've got something like that on each other". With her own distrust mounting, Phyllis also decides to kill her accomplice. One night, he tries to ambush her, but she forestalls him and shoots at him, instead. He survives, though, and the end sees both of them on a steamship heading to Mexico: Keyes has given them an ostensible chance to escape formal justice by booking their passages - without them knowing about the other. تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و نهم ماه سپتامبر سال2013میلادیعنوان: غرامت مضاعف؛ اثر: جیمز ام کین؛ مترجم: بهرنگ رجبی؛ تهران، نشر چشمه، سال1390، در151ص، شابک9786002290250؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا سده20معنوان: غرامت مضاعف؛ اثر: جیمز ام کین؛ مترجم: نیکا خمسی؛ تهران، علمی فرهنگی؛ سال1397؛ در108ص؛ شابک9786004366724؛ رمان عاشقانه جنایی «غرامت مضاعف»، اثر «جیمز ام کین» ستایشگران بسیاری داشته است، جناب «بهرنگ رجبی» مترجم کتاب، در مقدمه ی رمان، نویسنده را آغازگر رمان نوآر «امریکایی» دانسته اند، و نوشته اند: («دشیل همت»، «ریموند چندلر»، «دیوید گودیس»، «جیم تامپسون»، و «جیم الروی»، و همه‌ استادان جنایی‌نویسی پس از ایشان، بی‌شک وام‌دار راهی هستند، که ایشان باز کرد و پیمود)؛رمان پلیسی «پستچی همیشه دوبار زنگ می‌زند» از همین نویسنده نیز، بسیار خواندنی است؛ گویا در همان مقدمه بود خواندم، که «تام ولف» روزنامه نگار و نویسنده «آمریکایی»، گفته اند: (هر کس می‌خواهد داستان‌نویسی یاد بگیرد، برود رمان‌های «جیمز ام کین»را بخواند)»؛چکیده: داستان از مواجهه ی یک مامور بیمه، با همسر یکی از مشتریان، آغاز می‌شود، آنها سعی دارند، نقشه ی قتل مرد بیمه‌ گذار را اجرایی کنند؛ «فیلیس دیتریکسن» زنی است مکار، فاسد و پول‌پرست، که به گونه ی پیشامدی با «والتر هاف»، فروشنده ی بیمه ی شرکت «پاسیفیک»، آشنا می‌شود؛ «والتر» برای افزایش زمان قرارداد بیمه ی خودروی سواری آقای «دیتریکسن»، به منزل آن‌ها آمده است، اما داستان جور دیگری به پیش می‌رود؛ «دیتریکسن» در خانه نیست، و «والتر» خود را با «فیلیس» رودررو می‌بیند؛ به او دل می‌بندند، و «فیلیس» هم با اندیشه ی کشتن شوهر خود، «والتر» عقل‌ باخته و دل‌باخته را، ابزار دست خویش می‌کند، «والتر هاف» نقشه‌ ی ماهرانه‌ ای برای کشتن شوهر «فیلیس» میچیند، و برای سرکیسه‌ کردن شرکت بیمه، که خود از همه ی ریزه‌ کاری‌ها و پژوهشها، و چگونگی اثبات ادعای خسارت، آگاهی دارد، به «فیلیس» پیشنهاد می‌کند؛ «دیتریکسن» باید در سانحه‌ ی قطار بمیرد، تا «فیلیس» تاوان دوچندان دریافت کند؛ و...؛ تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 17/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/12/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Double as good! BOOK TO FILM I watched the film adaptation of Double Indemnity and I loved it!I think that the look of the actress Barbara Stanwyck is the very definition of a femme fatale. I am aware of other great examples like Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Lana Turner in The Postman always rings twice or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep to name a few, but when the term of “femme fatale” comes to mind, the image of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity is my first thought.When I watched for the first time the movie, it was shocking to see Fred MacMurray in this kind of movie, he did it masterfully, but my previous experience with him in acting was pretty much with his work on Disney-related films like The Shaggy Dog and The Absent-Minded Professor, so imagine my shock watching him in such dark role.I think that it was odd that Raymond Chandler was the selected one to co-work on the script adaptation for this novel written by James M. Cain. The film adaptation was well done, but the story is pretty much the same, with some minor exceptions like changing the last names of the main characters, so I don’t see why not to hire James M. Cain to adapt his own work. GREED MEETS LUST Double Indemnity is a quick reading and quite entertaining.Walter Huff, an Insurance Agent, really good at his job, meets a married woman, Phyillis Nirdlingler, and they plot to kill her husband for getting the juicy payment of a double indemnity insurance policy. Keyes, an agent in the Insurance Company in charge of checking any foul play in the collection of insurances' payments will be a real hound to be sure that everything sounds okay in the case.Maybe my only complain about the story is that Huff is too fast convinced to be involved in the murder plot. Yes, Phyllis is described like a sexy lady, but I think that only lust isn’t enough motivation for a character like Walter Huff to agree so quick. When the story evolves, you will know that this isn’t the “first rodeo” of Phyllis, so it’s quite believable that she would be thinking about a way to break off from her husband but with getting a big amount of money for her own in the process.However, Walter is described as hard-working, with many years in the insurance business, there isn’t any evidence that he had been a ladies’ man in the past, or even having debts for any reason. Also, Walter isn’t a fresh young boy, but a mature man, where if he didn’t do anything illegal before, it’s quite odd to start to do felonies then. So, okay, I admit that we, men, don’t think well when a sexy woman is around, but one thing is to do some small foolishness to impress a lady and quite another to commit a crime, not only an insurance fraud but also a murder!The novel is based on a real life incident, so yes, we, men, are such stupid. I am not saying that we aren’t able to do such kind of things, only I comment that the character of Walter Huff, in the novel, lacks of a some convincing reason to agree so dang fast to get deep in misdeed.Another factor that I enjoyed about the book is that while it's clearly a noir story, instead of having a private detective as the main character, the story doesn't have any private detective at all (Sure, Keyes does many investigative work in his position in the Insurance Company, but he's not a private detective) and also, the story is told from the point of view of the culprit ones.Double Indemnity is a smart story, with an engaging narrative, showing the dark side of human nature and how a couple can coldy design, step-by-step, the perfect way to murder a person in order to get money, and how the chaos of real life is ruthless with everybody, good or bad.

What is it with this James Cain? First, I tried reading The Postman Always Rings Twice to prepare for my civil service exam, but it was all about murder and didn’t have anything at all about postal regulations. Then I read Double Indemnity to try and become an insurance agent and once again, it’s nothing but a guy getting busy with another man's wife and then plotting to kill him. At least this one actually had some stuff about the insurance industry, and I did learn a bit about fraud. Still, it was mostly about murder. This Cain must have had a lot of problems. Or maybe these books shouldn’t have been shelved with the study guides at the library?

Just as good as everyone always says it is.

The novel begins with first person narrator Walter Huff reflecting back on the sequence of events that started when he remembered a renewal over in Hollywoodland. We read: "That was how I came to this House of Death, that you've been reading about in the papers. It didn't look like a House of Death when I saw it. It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California." This sense of foreboding hangs over each and every sentence. Alert: my review contains what could be considered spoilers. Turns out Walter Huff is an insurance salesman who wants to beat the insurance Industry at its own game. Walter sees the whole world of insurance as a roulette wheel, and since he can see its inner workings from behind the scene, he wants to play the wheel and cash in. However, Walter needs a partner, that is, an outside plant, a customer willing to join him in playing the game, in placing a bet, in putting the chips down in a gamble to commit a murder that will look like suicide so he and his partner can collect big time, double indemnity, on the life insurance policy.Walter finds his plant in Phyllis who lives with her husband and stepdaughter in that Spanish house in Hollywoodland, a house looking like all the others . But what a plant! Little does Walter know Phyllis is a flesh and blood embodiment of the goddess of death - the energy of the universe that's fierce, dark and chaotic, the energy of the universe that is your worst nightmare. Phyllis is more than happy to join Walter in killing her husband to collect the money. Of course, for Phyllis, killing her husband is much, much more than just murder and collecting from the insurance company. Phyllis loves the killing.The writing is tight, compressed and filled to the verbal brim with tension. Here is an example of Walter Huff's reflection: "There's nothing so dark as a railroad track in the middle of the night. The train shot ahead, and I crouched there, waiting for the tingle to leave my feet. I had dropped off the left side of the train, into the footpath between the tracks, so there wouldn't be any chance I could be seen from the highway." Hard-boiled noir, anyone?With Cain we have clear-cut, penetrating character descriptions. Here is Huff describing one of the men he must deal with at his insurance company: "Keyes is head of the Claims Department, a holdover from the old regime, and the way he tell it young Norton (the company president) never does anything right. He's big and fat and peevish, and on top of that he's a theorist, and it makes your head ache to be around him, but he's the best claims man on the Coast, and he was the one I was afraid of."The end of the novel has Phyllis covering her face in chalk white with black circles under her eyes and with red on her lips and cheeks, rapped in a hideous red silk scarf, all ready to jump to her death from the ship she's traveling on into the ocean, to jump at night and be torn apart by sharks under a full moon. Walter, who is also on the ship, tells Phyllis he himself will join her in jumping from the ship under a full moon to be torn apart by sharks. Walter finally understands this is what happens when you have evil intentions and ask the goddess of death to be your partner in crime. Double Indemnity is James M. Cain's unforgettable, one-of-a-kind classic.

To be honest with you, this book wasn't even on my radar. I was having lunch with someone when we got around to talking about my love for Crime Mystery Fiction and they suggested this as their favorite of those type books. Lo and behold, they have a copy of it and I read it that very day. At only a little over 100 pages, it's easy to read and the fast-pace of it makes it all fly by. Oh, and not to mention that it really is that good! Double Indemnity is about an insurance salesman who meets a woman interested in taking out accidental insurance on her husband. His attraction to her clouds his usual judgement and next thing he knows he's wrapped up in a murder plot that just might do him in. But it's not as simple as that. (It rarely ever is, right?) As love and loyalty to one's work complicated things even more, this story becomes all that much more exciting. There's affairs, death, family troubles, more death, love, DEATH...yeah, it's good. I wasn't expecting to read this book, but it's going to be remembered as one of my all time favorites thanks to my friend randomly recalling a book they read back in college. Brains are weird. What did I think?: I was pleasantly surprised by this story and couldn't put it down until I knew how it all ended. Thankfully I had a rainy Saturday and a broken leg so I could afford to get lost in a story like this. Who should read it?: If you like crime and/or mysteries, or even more the femme fatale style of writing then I think you'll enjoy this one. Apparently many people read this back in school, have seen the movie or the play version - I had not, sadly - and reading back through it as an adult made it all that much more enjoyable. I highly recommend it, especially if you're looking for an action packed, easy read. WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM

Judging by its popularity on Goodreads, not too many people appear to be familiar with James M. Cain's novel "Double Indemnity". That's quite comprehensible, considering that first of all, it's a rather old book which has successfully been adapted into an equally old black-and-white Hollywood classic, and second of all, the story is rather dated and not quite as relevant or interesting today as it may have been thirty, fifty, eighty years ago. I still love it to death. Let me elaborate a bit on why I think this is such a great book (and, for that matter, such a great movie).Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" from 1944 is one of my favorite movies of all time. I've seen it several times and never get tired of watching Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson and Jean Heather act the hell out of this script. At first, I wasn't even aware that Wilder's film was not based on an original screenplay like many of his other films (such as "The Apartment", "Some Like It Hot" or "Sunset Boulevard"). As soon as I found out, I didn't hesitate to seek out the source material and started reading it, all the while wondering what it was that fueled my fascination with Wilder's film to such an extent. After all, "Double Indemnity" tells an entertaining, exciting and engaging story, and it consists of numerous twists and turns you wouldn't necessarily expect, but is it completely original? We all have seen, heard and read fragments of this story before: An insurance representative falls in love with a housewife and lets himself be talked into a murder scheme involving insurance fraud. Any more details would reveal too much about the nature of the story, but let it suffice to know that the character of the femme fatale has appeared numerous times before, and so did the unsuspecting husband, the unfortunate protagonist or the investigator.At its heart, "Double Indemnity" is a classic thriller. Unlike today, when the landscape of novels is dominated by many mystery and thriller books seeking popularity and shock value by involving as many unexpected twists and turns as necessary to keep readers engaged, in the 1930s it wasn't quite as usual to read novels which saw the plot take a different direction every five pages or so without losing its credibility. I wouldn't consider the genre's popularity a problem at all, but the sheer quantity of contents available ensures that not too many plot twists can still come as a surprise to the reader. As a result, what is needed is the strength of the writer to ensure that no matter how a) original and b) absurd these plot twists are, they are credible enough to not cause the reader to lose their interest.James M. Cain excels at this task, and so does Billy Wilder in his award-nominated screenplay based on Cain's novel. The dialogue is absolutely perfect; there is not a single unnecessary line, and yet it feels like you are following these characters on their odyssey through Hollywood as though they really existed. Atmosphere and setting have always been two important aspects strongly connected to classic Noir films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and they do likely play a major part in the film's success, but the film couldn't have been as great without Barbara Stanwyck's magnetic performance as the scheming Phyllis, and the novel couldn't have been as great without Cain's electrifying characterization of Phyllis.Perhaps I only love the film so much because Barbara Stanwyck is one of my favorite actresses and I have been fascinated with her career and her life for a long time, but reading the novel reinforced my opinion that this is one of the best thrillers ever written. It's the stuff classic Hollywood was made of and many future soap operas would take inspiration by, and James M. Cain probably found motivation in a few films released before his book only to take a completely new direction with his novel. It's not his only book which has successfully been adapted by Hollywood (two more of his novels are The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce), but I genuinely can't imagine them to be as great as this. It's a rare case that I find the adaptation to be as great as the novel itself, but this is one of those instances. “I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the woman.” Also, if you are not convinced yet: this book is really short at just about 100 pages, so if you have about three or four hours (plus two more hours to either watch "Double Indemnity" for the first time or to give it a rewatch) to spare, then why are you still hesitating?

One of the most tightly written books I've ever read, by the godfather of the type of noir fiction that I love. Not. A. Word. Wasted. In the book, Walter Huff goes to the Hollywood Hills to sell a car insurance renewal to Mr. Nirdlinger. But he gets caught up and starts falling hard for Mrs. Nirdlinger, who doesn't waste any time asking about accident insurance. We can pretty much guess where that leads! But even though we know where this is going, like a car crash, we can't take our eyes away. Even Walter knows where it's heading but he can't turn away either, because to his horror, he realizes that he's in love. I knew then what I had done. I had killed a man. I had killed a man to get a woman. I had put myself in her power, so there was one person in the world that could point a a finger at me, and I would have to die. I had done all that for her, and I never want to see her again as long as I lived.That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate. This is the perfect introduction to classic noir and it inspired everything that came afterward. It's even better than the classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice , but it has a more disappointing ending. This is one of the closest examples of a perfect book to me but falls a bit short because of that strange resolution. If it had Postman's ending (or the movie adaptation's ending) it would be perfect! But still, it feels like Cain took everything good about Postman and ramped it up a notch here. This book seems like a better draft of that book, making it even tighter, more suspenseful, and even more razor sharp, with an even more relentless pace and even stronger characters (how awesome was Keyes?) and dialogue. And in 1944, Billy Wilder teamed up with Raymond Chandler and churned out a movie that might be even better! But Double Indemnity is everything that I look for in crime writing and in books in general. Cain doesn't waste any precious time with bullshit. It is a lean, efficient, and suspenseful piece of writing, and dark as the grave... "I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake. That night I did something I hadn't done in years. I prayed.

There's a reason this is a classic and has stood the test of time, and you only have to read the first few pages to fully understand why. It all starts with a delicious chill up your spine, your eyeballs riveted to the page, your breath held, the "gotta know what happens next" monster rattling the bars of his cage. Your first thought: Strap on baby, this is gonna be g-oooodCain is a MASTER storyteller: his cutthroat instincts for plot and pacing unerring and enviable. His ear for dialogue is enough to make grown men cry and women purr. It's sharp, with staccato beats and primal rhythms. And he makes it all look so easy which anyone who has ever put pen to paper knows, easy it is not ... ever. Whether you believe Cain to be a genius, an idiot savant or the prince of pulp, there's no denying his enduring appeal and lasting legacy to the world of literature. And not just the written word, but film as well, since so many of his stories have been adapted into silver screen classics that resonate with awesomeness to this day. As a movie, Double Indemnity is pure gold, yet the vein from which it is mined is richer still. Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis is THE femme fatale, yet there is so much nuance and depth missing from her character in the film (in what is already an amazing performance). Cain's Phyllis is so much more than a sultry seductress and the cold-blooded spider hanging in her web. But I will leave the pleasure of that discovery to you. I waited waaaaay too long to read this.

It's a shame that most people are more familiar with the movie based on this novel than with the book itself. Don't think for a moment that if you've seen the movie you've read the book because it's just not so. There are a number of differences between page and screen, and also, watching the movie doesn't allow you to really enter and experience Cain's dark and cynical worldview as much as reading the book does. If nothing else, the ending of this book (as compared to the movie) is just phenomenal, creeps up on you slowly, and is nothing at all like the easy way out offered by the film. Then there's Cain's prose. One of my favorite quotations from this book is the following:"She's made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks. She's got that red thing on. It's awful-looking. It's just one big square of red silk that she wraps around her, but it's got no armholes, and her hands look like stumps underneath it when she moves them around. She looks like what came aboard the ship to shoot dice for souls in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner." If that isn't a picture in words, I don't know what is. Cain is a true master of his craft, and Double Indemnity is one of the best noir novels in existence. I could go on, but why? The book is beyond perfect, and if you read it slowly, you'll totally understand what I mean.