Double Indemnity

⚖The case for it

An insurance agent and a bored housewife plan to kill her husband for the insurance money. Cain's second masterpiece of amour fou and fatal consequence. Raymond Chandler co-wrote the film with Billy Wilder; the novel is tighter and more relentless. The insurance investigation angle (actuarial logic detecting crime) is prescient.

— the canon

✕The case against

Cain wrote it fast for magazine serialization and the seams show. Phyllis swells from bored housewife into a near-supernatural angel of death, prior victims and all, and plausibility goes with her. The closing chapters lurch onto an ocean liner toward a suicide pact the story has not earned. Even the film adaptation knew to throw that ending overboard.

— the honest librarian