Sexual Obsession
The theme of sexual obsession pervades all of Cain’s crime fiction. His noir-ish world is one in which strong sexual passions stir beneath the surface of interactions between men and woman; those who act blindly and impulsively upon them generally do not turn out well. Unlike with Cain’s other famous adulterous murderous couple—in The Postman Always Rings Twice—however, Walter and Phyllis are not drive to murder primarily by a strong desire to be together forever after. Above all else, this is the story of a murder motivated by larceny. The murder cannot be committed without a strong plan, however, and it is sexual desire that brings together the right participants. Like sexual intercourse, however, once the deed is done, the desire flattens out and once the sexuality component deflates, the couple have a hard time finding much that is attractive about the other that is not related to the financial dependability on the other.
Greed
The narrator basically implicate the world as a cesspool of greed with the caveat that greed comes in many different forms with subsequent levels of what might be “sinfulness.” Walter Huff, the insurance agent who narrates, makes it clear that Phyllis operates on a much higher level of sinfulness than he does even though they both kill for money. The victim—whom Phyllis marries after first working as a nurse and before killing his first wife—is also characterized as a more sinful victim than others might be because of the greed which operated his life. Most importantly, however, Walter connects the state of pervasive greed to the insurance industry; he even terms is “the biggest gambling wheel in the world.” Buying or not buying and deciding which to buy and not to buy is a gamble and the amount of insurance one buys—0r sells—is determined to a greater extent than most realize on the buyer or seller’s level of greed. And, of course, there are the lengths the insurance company is willing to go to in order to protect their reputation at the expense of justice.
The Criminal Element
The two characters who commit the heartless crime at the center of Double Indemnity are anything but typical profiles in thuggery. Phyllis and Walter are primitive thieves, plain and simple. This is not a murder of passion, but a very coldly calculated attempt to exploit the intricacies of a legally binding insurance contract in order to double the payment for a murder that must look like an accident. It takes planning and a shocking amount of heartless physical involvement. Not to mention that the two also had to carefully orchestrate plans for covering up the crime when the inevitable investigation was launched. Criminals were still viewed as fairly easy to pick out from the crowd at the time when the book was written; the ordinary middle class schlub who turns out to be a psychopathic had not yet become an everyday part of the local news broadcast. Cain’s novel is particularly notable in the development of American crime fiction for being one of the first present murderers as the type of people who might be your neighbor or co-worker that no one ever imagined being involved in such a thing.
