Instructional manual for insurance

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It doesn't seem likely in any event that a murder planned to fit such a specific set of circumstances would be cooked up by anyone else, let alone spawn any sort of "copycats." But something that was "a novelty at the time" sounds more like a recommendation than an indictment.

As it happens, the novel's author, James M. Cain, had already used the idea - without the insurance angle - of a murder staged to look like an accident in his earlier book, "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (filmed two years after Double Indemnity), in which a drifter plots with the young and sexy wife of an older man to get him drunk and push the car he's in over a cliff.

And in the decades since, there's been no shortage of killers who plotted murders that wouldn't look like murders. In '02 for example, a respiratory therapist in Glendale, CA (where I lived at the time) was sentenced for multiple murders committed over a 10-year period by injections of a paralytic drug that caused cardiac arrest in patients. He was nicknamed "The Angel Of Death."

And here's something interesting: in the "Double Indemnity" novella, this is an identity that Phyllis herself has adopted. Several earlier murders when she was a nurse are referred to, and she tells Walter:

"There's something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death sometimes. I'm so beautiful then. And sad. And hungry to make the whole world happy, by taking them out where I am, into the night, away from all trouble, all unhappiness."

Fascinating parallel.

Anyway, I doubt people will ever stop trying to dream up ways to commit undetectable murders, by whatever means. Nothing outdated about that.


Poe! You are...avenged!

Yeah, that's where Walter tripped up, because it got Keyes' "little man" working.

But a couple points about the "unbelievable" factor: as Walter says in his confession, "I was trying to think with your brains, Keyes, because I wanted all the answers ready for all the questions you were gonna spring as soon as Dietrichson was dead," but he is a salesman, and doesn't possess Keyes' instincts or experience.

When I worked in the insurance business back in the '70s, everybody had their niche, and the sales force didn't worry about the problems of the rating, underwriting, accounting or claims departments any more than we in the accounting department did about any of theirs. If there was anything that didn't ring true for me, it was Walter saying, "In this business, you can't sleep for trying to figure out all the tricks they could pull on you." I never knew anyone in sales who gave things like that the slightest thought; as Keyes says, "they'll write anything just to get it down on the sales sheet."

The other point is that Walter had it, as he tells Phyllis the night the application was signed, "all worked out for a train" before Dietrichson broke his leg. The injury necessitated some late-in-the-day improvisation, to which Walter had apparently not given much thought: "I tried to keep my mind off her and off the whole idea. I kept telling myself that maybe those Fates they say watch over you had gotten together and broken his leg to give me a way out."

And then Phyllis called to tell him the trip was on for that evening, and it was in those final hours that he slipped up.


Poe! You are...avenged!