Cain’s ‘Postman’ Rang First in the Valley

James M. Cain had lost his job as a screenwriter at Paramount when he moved into a rented house in Burbank and began his first novel.

The house--a white-frame California Craftsman at 616 E. 10th St., now South Bel Aire Drive--was an affordable $45 a month, and affordable mattered to Cain since he had lost his $400-a-week gig on “The Ten Commandments” and other film projects.

Throughout 1933, Cain wrote frantically, typing with two fingers, to finish a book he titled “Bar-B-Que.”

In it the sexy Cora conspires with her vagrant lover to kill her husband for his gas station and luncheonette. The steamy heroine was inspired by a flesh-and-blood siren who pumped Cain’s gas whenever he stopped at her station near Thousand Oaks en route to Ventura.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf paid Cain a $500 advance but wanted the title changed. Knopf suggested “For Love or Money.” Cain would have none of it. “There is only one rule I know on a title,” he wrote. “It must sound like the author and not like some sure-fire product of the title factory.”

Published in 1934, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” won raves from the critics and became America’s first modern best-seller.

Cain began a second book, about a deadly Glendale housewife in cahoots with her insurance man, called “Double Indemnity.”

Evidently, even then, Valleyites were prone to Westside residence envy. Cain decided he needed a larger, fancier house on the other side of the hill. With royalties from “Postman” and a $25,000 sale to MGM under his belt, he could afford it. He bought a Tudor castle in the Hollywood Hills for $7,500.

Today, Cain’s Burbank residence is the home of Ken Green, director of corporate communications at Disney.

A writer himself, Green is lovingly renovating the house that gave birth to an American classic. The house not only bears the mark of Cain, it is an easy walk to Green’s office at Disney.