Mr. Cain has written the most engrossing, unlaydownable book that I have any memory of….

"The Postman Always Rings Twice" is so continuously exciting that if you can put it down before you've finished it, you are not the reader I think you are…. To my mind, its style, which some will compare with Hemingway's, is better than most of Hemingway's, and as good as the Hemingway of "Twenty Grand." It is as tightly written, and as vernacularly dictaphonic as Lardner. And, like Lardner, it is slangless, though so intensely colloquial that to many readers it will give the effect of slang. I can't detect a stylistic flaw in the book.

It is, in addition to being a first-rate story from its beginning to its surprise—though not tricky—ending, thrilling, credible, humorous, heart-breaking, romantic, and realistic. I could say that it was unsentimental, too. But that is...