There's not a lot of fancy prose to be found here (by design, according to the author) but if the narrator were to sit next to you on a bar stool and start to recount his story, you would be glued to that stool for whatever time was necessary to see it through to its conclusion. Fortunately for you and your bladder, it clocks in at a little over 100 pages so you wouldn't be there too long.

This is the tale of two amoral people who met and fell in love and were eventually, maybe, changed by that love. But not before they made more than one attempt at knocking off the woman's older Greek husband-which is only the beginning of their troubles. This is competently told noir (and for my money, was better and more affecting than one of the other classics of the genre, The Big Sleep.) It's a tale of murder and double cross as well as a pondering on why some people can't just either accept their lot in life or walk away from it.

This novel has been in the news recently because Ron Hansen has written a non-fiction account of the real-life Jazz Age murder that supposedly inspired this and another Cain novel, Double Indemnity. Here's another bit of trivia about it: according to the back of my version, it inspired Camus' The Stranger.

The title phrase incidentally is never used in the book but Wikipedia has a great story on its origin and meaning. This has been made into a film twice already but I'm really hoping the Coen Brothers get their hands on it one day.