[1] Cain’s literary oeuvre had drifted into obscurity by the late 1960s, and as a novelist he was at his nadir.
Then renewed interest in the hardboiled fiction of the 1930s by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler drew attention to Cain’s contributions to the genre.
[2] Alfred A. Knopf publishers responded by offering this anthology of three of Cain’s most successful novels, Cain X 3: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941).
[3] Literary critic Tom Wolfe’s fulsome praise for Cain in a 1962 review of author Norman Mailer‘s An American Dream (1965) prompted Knopf to include a laudatory introduction to Cain X 3 by Wolfe.
[4][5] Cain X 3 garnered effusive praise from the Time, The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Tribune and the Village Voice.