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They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” So begins the story of vagabond outsider Frank Chambers in the first sentence of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the 1934 debut novel by 42-year-old James M. Cain, a once-aspiring opera singer who, until then, had made his living alternately in newspapers and in screenwriting.

Cain had a way of throwing his readers right into a novel, as if tossing them off a truck. He was dubbed the twenty-minute egg of the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, which included the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, writers whose gritty, picaresque narratives were often violent reactions to the cozy, class-conscious world of the British crime novel.

But even upon first impression, Harold Strauss of The New York Times noted that The Postman was a different breed of novel. “Cain has developed the hard-boiled manner as a perfect instrument of narration.” Cain was a master stylist of narrative momentum.

Seventy-five years on, his best storylines have been turned into much-celebrated Hollywood adaptations, and they live on among cinéastes as hallmarks of film noir. But what has sadly been buried away is the recognition of Cain's considerable literary craft, and nowhere are those merits more fully realized than in this first book. Tom Wolfe famously suggested that Norman Mailer read Cain to learn how to write a novel, and Albert Camus admitted to using Postman's structure as a template for The Stranger.

James M. Cain: 'I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called'

Hovering around 100 pages, depending on the edition, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a wonder of narrative brevity, delivered through a disciplined, coldly objective style that couples devilish pacing with prose of exacting precision and a deft ear for colloquial dialogue. That terse style infects every turn of this slim novel.

Postman is the Depression-era confessional of Frank Chambers, an anti-hero from the underbelly of the American Dream who lands one noonday at the side of a California highway. By the second paragraph, he stumbles into the Twin Oaks Tavern, and by the end of the first short chapter, when he sets eyes on Cora Papadakis, the attractive wife of the tavern's owner, we know they're bound for trouble. A few pages later, they're so trapped by passions that she begs him to bite her lip, and he draws blood. A mere five pages later, they've begun scheming the murder of her husband.

Postman is violent, too, violent and sexually aggressive enough to have garnered numerous obscenity charges, as well as bans in Boston and Canada. But Cain's violence is more a pure distillation of boiled-over desires than a show of rigorous masculinity. It arrives, like nearly everything else in Postman, in a deeply clipped style, which means that it's over and done with in a matter of words, before anyone knows what has really hit them.

“ Revisiting Postman, contemporary readers will spot the connections between Cain and the French existentialists ”

But more captivating than a Cain murder is the inevitable existential blowback that deepens murder into a tragic crisis of conscience, ultimately dooming its practitioners to failure. Murder in The Postman is a climax, but it's also a turning point. From there on in, the anti-hero is forever entangled with the state, for murder is ultimately a societal concern that ensnares the murderer in a web of bureaucracy. The true price of murder in Cain's world is not guilt, but the freedom to live unnoticed outside the great social contract.

Revisiting Postman, contemporary readers will spot the connections between Cain and the French existentialists, who were inspired by his exacting attention to the outside world and his ability to draw complex moral dilemmas from it.

And yet, in North America, as crime fiction grew into a genre of conventions, and his taut stories – including Postman, 1936's Double Indemnity and 1943's Mildred Pierce – were turned into famous movies, Cain instead gained an acclaimed reputation as a storyteller of hard-boiled crime. It was a pigeonhole that made him uncomfortable.

“I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called,” he wrote in the preface to the 1943 publication of Double Indemnity, a novella that was in many ways the twin of Postman. Elsewhere, he noted, “I write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept. I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is that, rather than violence, sex or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation that gives them the drive so often noted.”

It's a shame that in the 75 years since his debut, Cain has been largely relegated to readers of detective fiction. Contemporary literary writers could do worse than to learn a thing or two from reading his novels, as Tom Wolfe once suggested. His fate is not dissimilar to Philip K. Dick's, in that he wrote compulsively readable works that defied easy categorization, blending rigorous literary craftsmanship with material more serious writers and academics dismiss as pulp.

But at his finest, as he was in The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain batted around the craft of storytelling like it was no one else's. “In the broadest sense, he is no asset as yet to American literature,” Strauss concluded his New York Times review, rather ominously, “for he adds nothing in breadth, but only in intensity, to our consciousness of life.” From today's vantage point, that intensity is more than enough to revisit one of the 20th century's great stylists.

Dimitri Nasrallah is the Montreal-based author of the novel Blackbodying. He is working on a second novel.