It didn't look like a House of Death when I saw it. It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof and a patio out to one side.
The novel is structured as a confession told after the fact. Therefore, everything is described with the perspective of hindsight which allows for a rich sense of irony than it would be if told from a third-person objective point of view. The juxtaposition of an undistinguished suburban home with being a “House of Death” sets the stage for the layers of ironic narrative to come after this opening paragraph.
“But we’re going to do it.”
“Yes, we’re going to do it.”
“Straight down the line.”
“Straight down the line.”
The decision to kill a man for nothing more than insurance money has been made between the man’s wife and the insurance agent who sold her the policy. They have become as one, a symbiotic offspring of greed and lust. For now.
“When you’ve handled a million of them you know, and you don’t even know how you know. This is murder.”
It seems to be a perfect murder. The official inquiry leaves too much open: maybe it was an accident and maybe it was a suicide. What it doesn’t appear to be, however, is premeditated murder. To anyone but the one person that really matters: the immediate supervisor of Walter Huff. Keyes has a talent for going with a gut feeling even when it flies in the face of all available evidence. And Keyes believes it was murder.
What you’ve just read, if you’ve read it, is the statement. It took me five days to write it, but at last, on Thursday afternoon, I got it done. That was yesterday.
The entire story is just one long confession composed after the fact, but before the actual end of the story. Huff still has just a little more to write; he and Phyllis have just a little life led to live before it inevitably comes crashing down all around them. The choice of narrative perspective is as significant in the way this novel is told as anything else about it. Double Indemnity is a textbook for teaching readers and beginning writers just how truly important establishing the proper point of view for a story actually is.
