Jealous Woman

by James M. Cain

Ed Horner, an insurance salesmen, gets involved with an attractive divorcee, whose ex-husband is later murdered

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Noir

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

#1371 in our old book database. Rated: Indifferent.

I read this as part of a James M. Cain kick I was on from 1996 to 2000. It's a sequel of sorts to Cain's Double Indemnity, but the story in the book is less interesting than the story behind the book, which can be found in detail here:

https://thrillingdetective.com/2018/1...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jealous...

The gist of it is that Cain wrote a sequel to Double Indemnity in 1946 called Nevada Moon but couldn't sell it until it was reworked and retitled Jealous Woman. So the 1950 Avon first edition and subsequent reprints do not include insurance investigator Barton Keyes (played by Edward G. Robinson in the 1944 classic film) or references to Double Indemnity, but in 1989 Black Lizard restored Cain's original manuscript text and Keyes' supporting role.

So if you want the Double Indemnity sequel, check your edition of Jealous Woman carefully before buying it or checking it out of the library.

[Bill Jenkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mysterious

This story was a bit weird to me. True to form, Cain is great at describing desirable women. The two main characters in this story are Ed Horner and Jane Develan. Horner is an insurance salesman and Develan is a rich British hottie. Horner is pulled in by Jane's current husband who wants to insure his life, Jane being the beneficiary. It didn't take long before you felt something weird was going on. You knew nothing was as it seemed. Jane Develan seemed harmless enough but was she really? I never understood the significance of the insurance policies described in the novel. What was the big deal? I'm not sure the insurance business is the same as it was back in the day but at least with Ed Horner's company, it seemed as though they were very leery of issuing any policy and when someone died, they didn't want to payoff! Of course someone dies in this story and at the inquest, a passel of insurance guys show up.

Who was the jealous woman? It wasn't Jane because she seemed to let everything roll off her back. There are other women characters in this story but I wouldn't classify any of them as "jealous". One is ambitious and another is horny but not jealous.

It seems as though in many of Cain's novels, he hits on the topic of trust in relationships. Can you really love someone who you don't trust? Cain believes you can. I'm sure there are many people out there that don't agree with this. Perhaps this is part of the Noir aspect of Cain's novels.

I'd say in general, this is an average effort by Cain.

[Douglas Castagna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars merely because of the author. I knew this one would be bad since he wrote both this one and Sinful Woman at the same time. The characters and plot are interchangeable and horrendously bad. I could not finish this one even though it was a shorter novella. I made it halfway through.

[Palo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was ok. Characters were fun, the crime itself was interesting how it happened. I just wish all characters were given about the same amount of time, as some, that turned out to be crucial to the story, weren't that well known to the reader at the important time.